A previously unknown language has been found in the Malay Peninsula by linguists from Lund University in Sweden. The language has been given the name Jedek.

Jedek is an Austroasiatic language spoken by 280 people in northern Peninsular Malaysia [Credit: Niclas Burenhult]

"Documentation of endangered minority languages such as Jedek is important, as it provides new insights into human cognition and culture," says Joanne Yager, doctoral student at Lund University.

"Jedek is not a language spoken by an unknown tribe in the jungle, as you would perhaps imagine, but in a village previously studied by anthropologists. As linguists, we had a different set of questions and found something that the anthropologists missed," says Niclas Burenhult, Associate Professor of General Linguistics at Lund University, who collected the first linguistic material from Jedek speakers.

The language is an Aslian variety within the Austroasiatic language family and is spoken by 280 people who are settled hunter-gatherers in northern Peninsular Malaysia.

The researchers discovered the language during a language documentation project, Tongues of the Semang, in which they visited several villages to collect language data from different groups who speak Aslian languages.

The discovery of Jedek was made while they were studying the Jahai language in the same area.

"We realised that a large part of the village spoke a different language. They used words, phonemes and grammatical structures that are not used in Jahai. Some of these words suggested a link with other Aslian languages spoken far away in other parts of the Malay Peninsula," says Joanne Yager.


The community in which Jedek is spoken is more gender-equal than Western societies, there is almost no interpersonal violence, they consciously encourage their children not to compete, and there are no laws or courts. There are no professions either, rather everyone has the skills that are required in a hunter-gatherer community. This way of life is reflected in the language. There are no indigenous words for occupations or for courts of law, and no indigenous verbs to denote ownership such as borrow, steal, buy or sell, but there is a rich vocabulary of words to describe exchanging and sharing.

"There are so many ways to be human, but all too often our own modern and mainly urban societies are used as the yardstick for what is universally human. We have so much to learn, not least about ourselves, from the largely undocumented and endangered linguistic and cultural riches that are out there," states Niclas Burenhult.

Joanne Yager and Niclas Burenhult have spent long periods of time working with speakers of Aslian languages. This is necessary in order to systematically study, observe and document the languages -- it is not enough to simply conduct interviews.

"This work depends on devoted field workers with a strong passion for discovering more about linguistic diversity," explains Niclas Burenhult.

An estimated 6,000 languages are currently spoken in the world. About 80 per cent of the world's population speak one of the major world languages, while approximately 20 per cent speak one of the 3 600 smaller languages. Researchers believe that about half of the world's languages will be extinct 100 years from now.

The study is published in Linguistic Typology.

Source: Lund University [February 06, 2018]

When it comes to naming colors, most people do so with ease. But, for odors, it's much harder to find the words. One notable exception to this rule is found among the Jahai people, a group of hunter-gatherers living in the Malay Peninsula. An earlier study showed that, for them, odors are just as easy to name as colors. Now a new study reported in Current Biology suggests that the Jahai's special way with smell is related to their hunting and gathering lifestyle.

Credit: Radboud University

"There has been a long-standing consensus that 'smell is the mute sense, the one without words,' and decades of research with English-speaking participants seemed to confirm this," says Asifa Majid of Radboud University in the Netherlands. "But, the Jahai of the Malay Peninsula are much better at naming odors than their English-speaking peers. This, of course, raises the question of where this difference originates."

To find out whether it was the Jahai who have an unusually keen ability with odors or whether English speakers are simply lacking, Majid and Nicole Kruspe at Lund University in Sweden looked to two related, but previously unstudied, groups of people in the tropical rainforest of the Malay Peninsula: the hunter-gatherer Semaq Beri and the non-hunter-gatherer Semelai. The Semelai are traditionally horticulturalists, combining shifting rice cultivation with the collection of forest products for trade.

The Semaq Beri and Semelai not only live in a similar environment; they also speak closely related languages. The question was: how were they at naming odors?

"If ease of olfactory naming is related to cultural practices, then we would expect the Semaq Beri to behave like the Jahai and name odors as easily as they do colors, whereas the Semelai should pattern differently," the researchers wrote. And, that's exactly what they found.

A Semelai speaker with Nicole Kruspe discussing odor [Credit: Noah Azman]

Majid and Kruspe tested the color- and odor-naming abilities of 20 Semaq Beri and 21 Semelai people. Sixteen odors were used: orange, leather, cinnamon, peppermint, banana, lemon, licorice, turpentine, garlic, coffee, apple, clove, pineapple, rose, anise, and fish. For the color task, study participants saw 80 Munsell color chips, sampling 20 equally spaced hues at four degrees of brightness. Kruspe tested participants in their native language by simply asking, "What smell is this?" or "What color is this?"

The results were clear. The hunter-gatherer Semaq Beri performed on those tests just like the hunter-gatherer Jahai, naming odors and colors with equal ease. The non-hunter-gatherer Semelai, on the other hand, performed like English speakers. For them, odors were difficult to name.

The results suggest that the downgrading in importance of smells relative to other sensory inputs is a recent consequence of cultural adaption, the researchers say. "Hunter-gatherers' olfaction is superior, while settled peoples' olfactory cognition is diminished," Majid says.

They say the findings challenge the notion that differences in neuroarchitecture alone underlie differences in olfaction, suggesting instead that cultural variation may play a more prominent role. They also raise a number of interesting questions: "Do hunter-gatherers in other parts of the world also show the same boost to olfactory naming?" Majid asks. "Are other aspects of olfactory cognition also superior in hunter-gatherers," for example, the ability to differentiate one odor from another? "Finally, how do these cultural differences interact with the biological infrastructure for smell?" She says it will be important to learn whether these groups of people show underlying genetic differences related to the sense of smell.

Source: Cell Press [January 18, 2018]