Koro language (India)


Koro is a possibly Sino-Tibetan language spoken by approximately 800–1,500 people in the East Kameng district at the western end of Arunachal Pradesh, India. Few speakers are under 20 years old. The people live among the Aka, but their language is only distantly related, with distinct words for numerals, body parts, and other basic vocabulary. The majority of Koro speakers live in bilingual households in which one or more members speak Ako or another indigenous language rather than Koro. Although it has resemblances to Tani farther to the east, it appears to be at least a separate branch of Sino-Tibetan. Researchers hypothesize it may have originated from a group of people enslaved and brought to the area.

Identification

Recognition in the academic literature of Koro as a distinct language goes back at least to the 2009 edition of the Ethnologue, which based its findings on a language survey conducted in 2005. It notes that Koro has only 9 percent lexical similarity with Hruso Aka, and that it is "highly dissimilar to neighboring languages".
In October 2010, the National Geographic Daily News published an article corroborating the findings of the Ethnologue based on research conducted in 2008 by a linguistic team of David Harrison, Gregory Anderson, and Ganesh Murmu while documenting two Hruso languages as part of National Geographic's "Enduring Voices" project. It was reported to them as a dialect of Aka, but turned out to be highly divergent.
Mark Post and Roger Blench propose that Koro is related to Milang in a branch, or perhaps independent family, they call Siangic.