A team of linguists working with National Geographic's Enduring Voices project uncovered this hidden language, known as Koro, in the state of Arunachal Pradesh. A member of the Tibeto-Burman language family, it has only 800 to 1,200 speakers and is unwritten.
The team was led by Gregory Anderson, who directs the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Salem, Ore., and K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. They videotaped speakers telling stories and talking, and made extensive word lists using the English alphabet to help classify the language.
Koro is very distinct from other languages spoken nearby, and the researchers hypothesize it may have originated from a group of people enslaved and brought to the area, though more research is needed.
