Mangaluru: Recent studies on Koragas that are commonly found in parts of Udupi, Dakshina Kannada, Shimoga, Kodagu and even Kasargod have revealed some interesting facts on their linguistic lineage.

The study was conducted by three youth from Mangalore University’s department of Zoology (Jason Sequira, Mohammed Mustak and Kodengodlu Vinuthalakshmi) along with Ranjith Das from the Yenepoya Research center and George Van Driem from Sprachwissenchaft in Switzerland.

The findings which they then published in Frontier of Genetics stated that these groups can be used to study their linguistic lineage. This is mainly because the Koragas have a mother tongue that they have brought down from a group that came all the way down from the Indus Valley Civilization at the time of their destruction.

Today, these seem to be a rather weak group, often marginalized by the rest of society. Sadly, recent census also shows a great decrease of ten percent in their population over the last two decades, leaving just about 16,000 of them spread over different places today,

According to Prof. Mustak MS, who is the chairman of the zoology department in Mangalore University, these tribes can greatly make up for the absence of ancient DNA in South India.

George Van Driem, the linguist who took part in the study, also expressed his fascination with the Indian population, stating that it provides an interesting puzzle of languages and cultures which are fun to piece together.

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