Koro | |
---|---|
Native to | India |
Region | Arunachal Pradesh, India |
Native speakers | 1,500 (2011)[1] |
Possibly Sino-Tibetan
| |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | jkr |
Glottolog | koro1316 |
ELP | Koro (India) |
Koro is a language spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, India.
It is typically classified as a Sino-Tibetan language, and has some resemblances to Tani farther to the east.[2] It has been argued that Koro is actually part of the Greater Siangic family, independent from but influenced by the Sino-Tibetan family.[3] Koro is spoken by about 1,500 people in the Koro-Aka tribe[1] who are found in East Kameng District, Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India.[4] Few speakers are under 20 years old.[5] The majority of Koro speakers live in bilingual households in which one or more members speak Ako or another indigenous language rather than Koro.[6] The Koro-Aka tribe lives among the Aka (Hruso) tribe. However, the Koro-Aka people speak a very distantly related language from the remaining Aka tribe who speak Hruso-Aka.[7] Researchers hypothesize Koro may have originated from a group of people enslaved and brought to the area.[8]
Recognition in the academic literature of Koro as a distinct language goes back at least to the 2009 edition of the Ethnologue (Lewis 2009), 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".[9][1]
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 (Aka and Miji) as part of National Geographic's "Enduring Voices" project.[5] It was reported to them as a dialect of Aka, but turned out to be highly divergent.
Mark Post and Roger Blench (2011)[10] propose that Koro is related to Milang in a branch, or perhaps independent family, they call Siangic.