What’s the Newest Language?

When the world’s languages get collectively for formal dinners, who sits on the children’ desk? While Arabic and Chinese settle closely into their seats, burdened by the burden of millennia, which languages are nonetheless outdoors, on the swing set, savoring the summer season night time earlier than Tamil tells them as soon as extra to get inside? Put much less nonsensically, what’s the latest language? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to various specialists to seek out out.

Recent PhD in linguistics from The Graduate Center, CUNY, now based mostly in Malmö, Sweden. His analysis focuses on prosody, intonation, and endangered language documentation. He has beforehand contributed to Gizmodo.

Even excluding conlangs (intentionally constructed languages like Esperanto or Klingon), new languages kind organically on a regular basis, typically in one in all two conditions. The first is when a deaf little one is raised in an all-hearing surroundings. In this case, a signed language known as a ‘homesign’ develops between the kid and listening to members of the neighborhood. These homesigns is probably not as grammatically complicated or secure as established signal languages, however can turn out to be so. A really well-documented case is Nicaraguan Sign Language, which has its origin in a gaggle of deaf college students who entered faculty collectively in 1980 and a number of the constructions of the homesigns they’d developed. NSL is now utilized by hundreds of individuals, together with its unique customers, who’re seemingly nonetheless alive. Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language can be lower than a century previous, and developed within the Negev area of Israel, which has a excessive incidence of deafness. This language is utilized by each deaf and listening to individuals locally.

The different state of affairs that results in new languages forming organically is having twins. When twins (or siblings shut in age) spend loads of time collectively they typically develop what’s known as ‘autonomous languages’. Unlike homesigns, these languages don’t usually get the prospect to develop and stabilize, as the youngsters who use them often combine into the language surroundings of their household/neighborhood. One of the longer-surviving autonomous languages was spoken by June and Jennifer Gibbons, a pair of twins born in 1963 and raised in Wales. The twins have been the one Black members of their neighborhood and have been ostracized by their friends. While the twins did additionally converse English, as they grew to become more and more socially remoted they stopped chatting with most individuals altogether, talking solely to one another of their language. They reportedly had a pact to proceed solely talking their autonomous language till one twin had died. Despite institutionalization and repeated makes an attempt to separate the twins and combine them into English-speaking society, their pact was held till Jennifer Gibbons’ dying in 1993, upon which June started talking English once more. While their story has seen protection in leisure and true crime media, their autonomous language has not seen any linguistic description.

Aside from these de novo languages, there are additionally instances the place ‘standardized’ types of languages are created and imposed by governments. For instance, the languages we all know as ‘Italian’ and ‘German’ are spoken in areas that weren’t all the time politically or linguistically unified. While based mostly loosely on current dialects of Italic and Germanic languages, the Italian or German you would possibly be taught in a textbook is a kind that’s in some sense ‘constructed’ and imposed on areas with current regional languages, a state of affairs known as ‘diglossia’. A latest instance is Bahasa Indonesia, which gained widespread use in Indonesia in 1945. This language is Malayic, like many regional languages of Indonesia, and there’s nonetheless diglossia between Bahasa Indonesia and the regional Malayic languages immediately.

Other languages are usually unimaginable to categorize as ‘new’ vs. ‘old’ given that each one languages endure gradual modifications over the course of generations, and thus it’s troublesome to select one time limit as their ‘origin.’ One often-cited ‘new language’ is Afrikaans, which diverged considerably from Dutch beginning within the 18th century. But all dialects diverge, and the road the place sufficient divergence has occurred to warrant calling one selection a ‘new language’ is unclear. Sometimes this line is cited as when the 2 varieties not are ‘mutually intelligible’, though Dutch/Afrikaans audio system can nonetheless perceive one another to some extent. Then there are instances like Danish, which Norwegian/Swedish audio system battle to know, however whose audio system can simply perceive Norwegian/Swedish. Given the speedy modifications Danish has undergone even within the final 100 years, maybe fashionable Danish can be a ‘new’ language. If you’re in search of a ‘new language’ you may get a textbook for, your finest bets are in all probability Indonesian, Afrikaans and Danish.

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Linguistics, UCLA

In a means, attempting to establish the most recent language is like attempting to establish the most recent animal—they’re constantly evolving, and exactly demarcate one iteration from one other. Add to that the truth that language is a social phenomenon and the duty turns into even more durable.

That stated, two examples do come to thoughts.

The first entails constructed languages, or conlags. These contain huge linguistic nerds getting collectively and inventing new languages. One well-liked latest instance could be the Na’vi language, created by a USC linguist named Paul Frommer for the film Avatar. Klingon is one other instance. The individuals who do that are huge, huge dorks, and so they actually get into it. The languages are very full.

But for higher or worse, there are a couple of less-than-ideal conditions wherein new languages have sprung up on their very own, and this brings me to my second instance: Nicaraguan Sign Language (Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua).

Basically, life for deaf kids in Nicaragua across the center of the final century was not superb—there was no neighborhood, no shared language, and also you have been usually stored at residence. You would possibly develop a type of slapdash collection of indicators along with your quick household, however you’d don’t have any means of speaking outdoors it.

That modified within the late ‘70s and early ‘80s with the Sandinista revolution. The Sandinistas prioritized deaf education for deaf children, and started busing deaf children into newly founded deaf schools. And these children—who’d been denied language their complete lives—spontaneously created NSL. Pretty rapidly, the language went from a form of pidgin or child language right into a fully-fledged language. It’s some of the fascinating tales in linguistic historical past.

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PhD student, Linguistics, UCLA

Trying to identify the ‘age’ of a language is a difficult task because most languages evolve naturally, and so you can go back and back and back and watch the language change little by little without pinpointing an exact start date. For example, modern English came from Old English, which came from Proto-Germanic, which came from Proto-Indo-European, and so on.

But every once in a while, a language does seem to come about at a very particular moment in time. One such kind of language that does this is a constructed language; that is, a language that was intentionally created. We see constructed languages in the media all the time, and most of the ones we are familiar with are modern and therefore easily dateable: Klingon was created in the ‘80s for one of the Star Trek films, and Dothraki was created more recently for Game of Thrones. Since anyone can create their own language at any time (in fact, there is a large community of ‘conlangers’), new constructed languages are born all the time. But, if we want to speak solely about natural languages, there are a few other examples of languages being ‘born.’

A contact language is one that is born through contact between two or more languages. Languages come into contact all the time, and we can see the effect even in English, which has lots of words borrowed from other words: taco from Spanish, tsunami from Japanese, and coffee, ultimately from Arabic. In modern English, contact has resulted mostly in individual words being borrowed, but sometimes the languages in contact each make such significant contributions, not only in vocabulary but also in grammar, that the resulting language is unrecognizable to speakers of the source languages. An example is Michif, a Mixed Language spoken by some Métis people in Western Canada and North Dakota. Michif is mixed in that its nouns and their structure come primarily from French, while its verbs and their structure come primarily from Cree. When such a language is born, we can estimate its time origin somewhat straightforwardly if the mixing of the two languages is well documented; for Michif, it likely developed its characteristic French/Cree split sometime in the early 1800s, placing it amongst the world’s ‘newest’ languages…

…if we wanted to identify the language that came about most recently without being intentionally constructed and without evolving from other languages, Nicaraguan Sign Language best fits the bill, to my knowledge.

Executive Director of the Canadian Language Museum

Conlangers seem to be creating new languages all the time, but not all of them take root and spread. I’m going to put my vote in for Toki Pona, which is new and seems to be growing. It was created by Canadian linguist Sona Lang in 2001 and then was expanded in her 2014 book Toki Pona: The Language of Good. The Toki Pona dictionary was released this past July.

A conlanger is someone who creates a conlanguage—that is, a constructed language, a language created for a specific purpose. The most widely used conlanguage is probably Esperanto, a language created in 1887 to facilitate communication between speakers from around the world. Many conlanguages are created as part of an imaginary world, such as the Klingon language developed for Star Trek, and Elvish, one of the many languages created by J. R. R. Tolkien. These languages differ from natural languages which develop organically over centuries from the interactions between a great many speakers.

Toki Pona is best described by the creator Sonja Lang: ‘Toki Pona is a human language I invented in 2001. It was my attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words. There are now thousands of speakers and 137 essential words.’ So not only is Toki Pona arguably the newest language, but it is likely the language with the smallest vocabulary. It is a language that forces constant creativity, to express your meaning with the simplest of tools. We can think of it as the opposite of English, which has by far the largest vocabulary of any language in the world.

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