A team of linguists from Lund University in Sweden announced this week they have identified an endangered minority language known as Jedek that is spoken by about 280 hunter-gatherers in the resettlement area of Sungai Rual, near Jeli in Kelantan state, Peninsular Malaysia.
Jedek is spoken by about 280 individuals in northern Peninsular Malaysia. Image credit: Lund University.
Jedek belongs to the Aslian group of languages, a typologically distinct branch of the Austroasiatic language family spoken in the Malay Peninsula.
Lund University researchers Joanne Yager and Niclas Burenhult discovered it 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.
“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,” Yager said.
“As linguists, we had a different set of questions and found something that the anthropologists missed,” Dr. Burenhult added.
The discovery of Jedek was made while the team was studying the Jahai language in the same area.
“We realized that a large part of the village spoke a different language,” Yager said.
“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.”
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,” Dr. Burenhult said.
“We have so much to learn, not least about ourselves, from the largely undocumented and endangered linguistic and cultural riches that are out there.”
A paper reporting the discovery is published in the journal Linguistic Typology.
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Joanne Yager & Niclas Burenhult. 2017. Jedek: A newly discovered Aslian variety of Malaysia. Linguistic Typology 21 (3); doi: 10.1515/lingty-2017-0012
