The newly reported Malaysian language that has no word for buy and sell
I’m a bit of a linguistics nerd, so this story is the confluence of two of my loves.
Scientists recently reported on a previously unknown(-to-them) language, spoken by fewer than 300 people in northern Malaysia, according to IFLScience.
You can hear a little snippet of the language here:
Though it is distinct from all the other languages, Jedek is a member of a larger group of languages called Aslian, which comprises about 50,000 native speakers of various languages, most of which are in danger of extinction.
It’s rarer than rare. Here’s the area of the world where its speakers live:
According to NPR, Lund University doctoral student Joanne Yager has done intensive fieldwork in the area, studying the language for four years:
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.
This is all be remarkable, but the best part is that Jedek has no word to describe concepts like “buy” and “sell.”
It does, however, have “a rich vocabulary to describe exchanging and sharing.” 😍
We at Quupe love it already.
