There are reports that a new language is being formed.
T’S spoken only by a few hundred people living in a tiny desert community, and almost exclusively by those under the age of 35.
But the discovery of a new language in remote Australia is causing a ripple of excitement among linguists around the world.
Lajamanu, with a population of around 850, lies on the northern fringe of the Tanami Desert, 870 kilometres south of Darwin and 560kms southwest of Katherine by road.
It is one of the Northern Territory’s most westerly communities and its original language, Warlpiri, is spoken by about 6000 people in the region.
Light Warlpiri,” as O’Shannessy calls it in a new paper published in the journal Language,” is a mix of English and two other local dialects, Kriol and Warlpiri.
“The striking thing about Light Warlpiri is that most of the verbs come from English or Kriol, but most of the other grammatical elements in the sentence come from Warlpiri,” O’Shannessy told LiveScience.
Lajamanu is essentially an isolated enclave. There are no fully paved roads, and a small plane delivers the mail each week. A supply truck also visits once a week to deliver goods to the town’s only store.
Walpiri itself is spoken by only about 6,000 people in the region, according to the Daily Telegraph. Kriol is another language recently created in Australia, first spoken in the country’s Northern Territory and Western Australia in the 1800s.
O’Shannessy says Light Warlpiri likely originated when workers from Lajamanu were employed on nearby cattle ranches. When those workers returned home, they began speaking in a mixture of Warlpiri, English and Kriol that eventually evolved into its own language.”
How does a Language originate?
I am not entering into a Linguistics Discussion nor a detailed study of the subject, but a simple fact.
Man has started using the Sign language.
Later these sounds were for understanding were assigned a specific meaning,
Words emerged.
This process soh
This should have taken hundreds of years.
Then Grammar, Literature developed, no body knows for sure which has preceded.
Thus a language evolves.
There has been a beginning for the language.
We can not see it.
Nor can we Physically identify it except by ears and the information of it by testimony.
Every language has Alphabets.
I am curious to know why the first letters of Languages has the Phonetic A , the sound of A, pronounced short or a little longer.
There is an origin.
We can not prove it physically by ourselves.
Similarly the Universe must have has a Cause to begin with.
If it is an accident. then the Accident is the Cause.
Just as ‘A’ is the basis of a Language, so is the Universe.
People call it God , some Nature.
”
திருக்குறள் : Thirukkural By Thiruvalluvar.
Just as the letter A is the beginning of any language, God(Reality) is the First cause of the Universe.
For those who are conversant in Sanskrit.
This stanza, contains all the components of the Pranava OM( A,U,M)
Source:
”
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- A New Language Is Being Born in This Remote Australian Village (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)
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