Wed June 20, 2012 Pakistan's 'Burushaski' Language Finds New
Relatives ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: It's like discovering a distant
cousin, a really distant cousin. It's like learning that someone
you had barely heard of is actually part of the family. In this
case, the family is the Indo-European family of languages. And
the umpteenth cousin is a language called Burushaski. It's
spoken by about 90,000 people, the Burusho people, and nearly
all of them live in Pakistan. A few hundred live in India. Just
to give a sense of what it sounds like, here's a joke in
Burushaski that we came across online. UNIDENTIFIED MAN:
(Foreign language spoken) UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language
spoken) SIEGEL: Well, I guess you had to be there. Look up
Burushaski and you'll see it's described as an isolate, a
language unrelated to any other language in the world. But
Professor Ilija Casule, of Macquarie University in Australia,
has rescued it from the linguistic orphanage. He says it has
similarities to Indo-European languages that are