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Linguists working in the Malay Peninsula have identified a language, now called Jedek, that had not previously been recognized outside of the small group of people who speak it.

The newly documented language is spoken by some 280 people, part of a community that once foraged along the Pergau River. The Jedek speakers now live in resettlement area in northern Malaysia.

Jedek was recognized as a unique language by Swedish linguists from Lund University, who ran across the new language while studying the Jahai language in the same region.

"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," Niclas Burenhult, associate professor of general linguistics and the first researcher to record the language, 

 released by the university. "As linguists, we had a different set of questions and found something that the anthropologists missed."

Doctoral student Joanne Yager spent four years doing intensive fieldwork and studying the language.

"There are so many undocumented, undescribed languages that nobody has worked with," Yager told NPR. "But the difference here is ... we didn't know that it existed at all. Most languages that are undescribed and undocumented, we know that they exist."

One possible reason the language went undetected for so long, she says, is that the formerly nomadic people who spoke it didn't have a single consistent name for it. (The name Jedek comes from one of several terms the speakers use.)

Research by Yager and Burenhult was published in the latest issue of 

 and publicly announced by Lund University on Tuesday.

You can hear a small sample of Jedek in a video published by the school.

Unknown language discovered in Southeast Asia

Yager says that Jedek is surprising, in part, because it has words that have little in common with the languages immediately around it — but which were familiar to linguists from languages "spoken farther away, like in other parts of Malaysia and southern Thailand."

And while the language is spoken by a very small community, it doesn't appear to be acutely threatened by extinction, like many other minority languages.

"It's always been quite a small language ... because the groups have been small and quite mobile," Yager says. "Children still learn the language, which is really great for the future prognosis of the language."

This is not the first time in recent history that a new language has been identified. In 2013, researchers at the University of Hawai'i announced that they had identified an 

 dating back to the 1800s, that is separate from American Sign Language.

And as NPR has reported, researchers in India discovered a previously undocumented language in 2008.

Those linguists, like the Swedish researchers who recognized Jedek, were doing research into other languages in the region when they found the language now called Koro:

Speaking to Science Friday in 2012, Harrison emphasized the importance of fieldwork in documenting oral languages. "You can't just take a speaker and sit them down in their room and pick their brain, because language is kind of like a living organism. It is lived in a natural environment," he said. "The language is alive."

The Swedish researchers who documented Jedek also emphasize the importance of fieldwork — extended periods of time spent with multiple speakers of a language.

Whether or not a language is "newly discovered," it's worth spending time digging into little-known languages, Yager says.

"The important thing is documenting this amazing diversity out there," she tells NPR. For many languages, researchers know that they exist and roughly where they're spoken — but nothing more than that. "And that's a real shame," she says. "There are all these amazing different ways of being ... a human that speaks language, that we're basically missing right now."

Arts and Culture

Swedish researchers were studying one rare language in Southeast Asia, when they discovered a group of 280 resettled people speaking a different language, never observed or documented before.

Linguists discover previously unidentified language in Malaysia

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