LINGUISTIC AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESOURCES FOR KORO

 

The Koro language, spoken in about nine villages west of Seppa, in East Kameng District, Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India, has been the subject of considerable, but quite unjustified, media brouhaha. The Koro, however, have a curious relationship with the neighbouring Hruso. The two cultures are a mirror of one another, despite the fact that the languages have virtually nothing in common. Almost all lexicographic items can be mapped to one another. The same is true for the Miji people, west of the Hruso, although the Miji are more culturally distinct. This point is made clearly in the comparative study of Grewal (1997). Both Hruso and Koro are locally classified using the term ‘Aka’ which is commonly found in earlier literature. The Koro appear in earlier publications as the ‘Miri-Aka’ which may have been responsible for some of the confusion or misleading statements in media reports.

 

Despite its close cultural relation with the Hruso, the Koro language is remarkably different, both phonologically and lexically. In an attempt to learn more about its likely affiliations a visit was made to Yangtse, one of the accessible Koro settlements, on December 8th, 2011 and a wordlist and sample sentences were recorded through the kind help of the village headman and the pastor.

 

Koro Wordlist

 

The Koro live in nine villages, with a small diaspora in Seppa, which is broadly a Nyishi town. Indeed, there are Nyishi in the Koro settlements and many Koro appear to speak Nyishi as a second language. It is hard to estimate their population but it is probably around 2-3000 speakers. The map shows their main settlements;

Map of Koro settlements

 

References to the Koro go back to Hesselmeyr (1868) and they rate a mention in MacGregor (1884) and Kennedy (1914). The first substantial published dataset is in Grewal (1997: 103 ff.). The transcription is not what could be wished and there is more analysis than actual data presented. Nonetheless, there is a useful grammar sketch and Koro is compared to Hruso and Miji. Abraham et al. (2005) include Koro in their survey of the languages of Western Arunachal Pradesh, although the lexical data is hard to extract. Finally, Anderson (2010) is a grammar sketch with some speculations on Koro etymologies. This data is the source of much unfounded publicity concerning a ‘hidden’ language, which has been fuelled by the American television and media enterprise, National Geographic. As suggested above, Koro has hardly been hidden; indeed, as the frontispiece to this paper shows, they have done their best to publicise their culture and language through music videos.

 

 

Images

 

Bibliography

Abraham, Binny, Kara Sako, Elina Kinny & Isapdaile Zeliang  2005. A Sociolinguistic Research Among Selected Groups in Western Arunachal Pradesh Highlighting MONPA. Unpublished report.

Anderson, Gregory D.S. 2010. Preliminary notes on Koro, a ‘hidden’ language of Arunachal Pradesh. Indian Journal of Linguistics, 71: 1-32.

Anderson, Gregory D.S. 2014. On the classification of the Hruso (Aka) language. Paper presented at the 20th Himalayan Languages Symposium, Singapore, July 16 2014.