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From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter. I teach linguistics at Columbia University, and today I want to talk about new languages. There are some, or at least I've always thought so. And I want to share with you what it feels like to be a linguist who studies new languages,

especially because some of you have asked, is there a such thing as a new language?

And the answer is yes.

And the way to get at it is not for me just to say, here is a new language.

That's no fun.

Let's try it this way by starting from the outside. Some years ago, it got around the way these things sometimes do just by chance

that one out of the thousands of languages in the world had died. It was a language called

Bo and it was spoken in the world had died. It was a language called Bo, and it was

spoken in the Andaman Islands, small islands off of India. There was something interesting about

what they said about Bo. And it's something that you read and hear all the time that actually

doesn't have a scientific basis. So this is is verbatim what one of the reports said.

The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.

The death of the woman, Boa Sr., was highly significant because one of the world's oldest languages, Bo,

had come to an end.

Okay, here's the off part.

One of the world's oldest languages.

...