The Language That’s Only 50 Years Old

When we talk broadly about the evolution of languages, we often use timelines spanning many thousands of years. Some linguists believe there might even have been a single original “Proto-Human” language — one from which all others evolved — spoken some 150,000 years ago. Since then, innumerable languages have evolved independently, flourishing and fading with the rise and fall of societies and civilizations. 

The evolution of a language tends to be a lengthy process, with changes occurring relatively slowly — often so slowly that one generation barely notices any real change in the way the next generation speaks, apart from the inevitable emergence of new slang. But one language spoken in Australia’s Northern Territory has bucked this trend entirely. Light Warlpiri, spoken today by around 350 people in the remote community of Lajamanu, is among the only languages in the world whose birth was actually witnessed and documented by linguists as it happened. 

The linguist Carmel O’Shannessy came across Light Warlpiri while working as a teacher in Lajamanu in the late 1990s. She noticed that adults in the community, typically those up to around 35 years old, were speaking a distinct new language. Older members of the community were practiced at switching between traditional Warlpiri, English, and Kriol (an English-based creole dialect), but this was something different, distinct, and unified. 

Through her research, O’Shannessy traced the language’s roots back to the 1970s and ’80s — and its existence originated with the children of Lajamanu. Rather than simply absorbing one dominant language, the children began reshaping the way the adults spoke into something new. For many children in the small community, it became their first language.

“During my four years living and working in the community,” O’Shannessy explained to Australian Geographic, “I realized that when children spoke to each other, every sentence contained both Warlpiri and English/Kriol.” But this was more than code-switching, the process of shifting from one language or dialect to another, depending on the context; according to O’Shannessy, it was a new language system, independent of the other languages spoken by the elders, with rules and patterns the children had never been explicitly taught by their parents. The kids of Lajamanu were, as she puts it, “active agents of language change.”

Light Warlpiri is particularly remarkable because it doesn’t just borrow words from multiple sources — plenty of languages do that, whether as loanwords, from slang, or elsewhere. What makes Light Warlpiri so fascinating is that it combines borrowed pieces from the mix of languages spoken by the older generations, creating an entirely original grammatical system found in none of its parent languages. 

For example, most of its verbs and verb structure come from English and Kriol, while many of its nouns have Warlpiri suffixes attached to them. However, the sentences are formed using what O’Shannessy calls a “radically innovative” structure independent from the languages previously spoken in Lajamanu. Even more unusual, Light Warlpiri has developed its own tense system. This includes distinct present and past forms that don’t come from any of the languages it descended from. 

Combined, these elements have created a way of talking so different from Warlpiri, Kriol, and English that Light Warlpiri clearly constitutes a new language — one of around 7,170 in use across our planet today — even though it has existed for only about half a century. If you want to hear what Light Warlpiri sounds like, O’Shannessy created a charming picture book-style video narrated by a 7-year-old from the Lajamanu community.