Speakers

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Speakers

dusseaux.antoine_289191, Tue, 2022-12-20 09:01
Regarding: 
Population
State
Closed
ISO 639-3: 
try

According to https://www.ethnologue.com/language/sgp 

there are "1,000 Turung speakers (Morey 2006)"

What can explain the discrepancy with this page?

Editorial Action

We will change Turung [try] in India from an extinct language to a living language, updating the speaker population and EGIDS as well as remove Turung as a dialect of Singpho [sgp].  These changes will be included in the next edition of the Ethnologue.

Comments

Chuck Fennig, Tue, 2022-12-20 11:46

Dear Antoine,

Thank you for alerting us to this problem with Turung [try] and Singpho [sgp] in India.

Ethnologue currently has Turung [try] as a long-extinct language with no speakers since about 1800, and Turung is also listed as a dialect of Singpho! For the long-extinct language part, we got information from Stephen Morey himself (https://www.elararchive.org/dk0006/), where he states that "in the late 18th or early 19th centuries, the Turung lived with the Singpho and adopted their language."

Unfortunately, we did not continue to read further in this article, where Morey says "Turung and Singpho are clearly endangered languages. Turung is only spoken inside the seven Turung villages ..."

So, first of all, we will need to remove Turung as a dialect of Singpho and remove the comment there giving the population of Turung (1,000 speakers from Morey 2006). I will continue to use the 1,000 speaker population since Morey uses that number again in the 2015 article cited above.

I will make these corrections for the next edition, but I am surprised that Stephen Morey did not contact us about this issue since we have been in contact with him in the past.

Best wishes for the Christmas season.

Chuck Fennig
Managing Editor, Ethnologue

dusseaux.antoine_289191, Tue, 2022-12-20 15:11

Thanks, Chuck! I wish you and all the Ethnologue/SIL team a Merry Christmas!

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