Speakers mixed in some completely new rules as well, such as using the suffix -m to refer to past and present events but not future ones. That custom was not present in any earlier languages, O’Shannessy says: “That really consolidated that this is a new [language] system all by itself.”

Read: The randomness of language evolution

The media hailed O’Shannessy for highlighting a newly “discovered” language, called Light Warlpiri. And that discovery is not an isolated incident. Within the past decade or so, linguists and anthropologists around the world have described a handful of recently recognized tongues for the first time, including Jedek in Malaysia, Koro Aka in northern India, and Zialo in Guinea.

Understanding how languages emerge and survive holds great interest for researchers, since many languages are slipping away in increasing numbers around the world. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) states that more than 40 percent of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages are endangered. But each new-language debut represents a bright spot against the global backdrop of widespread language die-offs. Tongues such as Light Warlpiri, Jedek, and Koro Aka fill gaps in our knowledge of how languages arise and endure, revealing some of the factors that can help keep rare languages alive.

Uncommon languages are better equipped to survive, researchers are learning, when young people are actively speaking them, whether in a family setting, in a school system, or in immersion programs. Elders who transmit cultural traditions to young people through a language can help it thrive, as well. But when the number of speakers drops from year to year—sometimes due to outside forces, such as globalization, that are difficult to control—rare languages might vanish, whether they’ve lingered for centuries or popped up seemingly overnight.

In some ways, the origin story of any language mirrors the broader story of how language evolved in the first place. Within close-knit groups of humans, whether on the savanna or in bustling towns, two factors have been present since ancient times: the need to communicate clearly and specifically, and the cognitive capacity to develop language systems that satisfy that need.

Relatively young languages, however, such as Light Warlpiri, are distinct in that they typically emerge out of the swirl of other, older languages that surround them. Many of these new languages arise in settings where there is some degree of cultural blending or displacement—and Light Warlpiri certainly fits that description. After British settlers arrived in northern Australia in the 1800s, indigenous Australians began to speak English and Kriol.

In this fluid setting, indigenous people became very comfortable switching between languages, a practice that helped drive Light Warlpiri’s emergence in the 1970s and ’80s. When adults spoke to children, O’Shannessy says, “they would speak in Warlpiri, but insert verbs and pronouns from English and Kriol. So the children internalized that system as if it was a single system.”