We do not discover new languages every day, do we? Well scientists researching a desert community in Australia have discovered a new language known as light Warlpiri. The language is being used by a group of approximately 300 people.

This new language is a combination of different languages such as traditional Warlpiri, Kriol and English. The Warlpiri people are a group of Indigenous Australians that speak the Warlpiri language and there are approximately 5,000 to 6,000 people in settlements and towns all over Australia. It has six vowels and 18 consonants.

Kriol is a language that was developed when the ‘Whites’ colonized Australia in order for the English, the Chinese and the Aboriginals to be able to communicate in the first years of their settlement in Australia.

According to the professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, Carmel O’Shannessy, most of the verbs of this language come from English or Kriol, while grammatical elements come from traditional Warlpiri. Warlpiri grammar is completely different from English or any other European language grammar. English grammar defines the rules that a sequence of words must be put in order for the sentence to make sense. However, in the Warlpiri and light Warlpiri languages there is no order in the placement of words. Additionally, in the newly discovered language words refer to both present and past but not the future and all those reasons make the new language a separate language, a complete different way of thinking to speak and understand those languages.

By John Black