In Hallowed Halls

A language that is unknown to anyone in the west has been found in India, with about a thousand speakers, called Koro. It is spoken by people living in the eastern province of Andhra Pradesh, and three linguists have now made its existence known to the outside world. Researchers Anderson and Harrison have decided that it is an Indian language.

That was the scuttlebutt but as always with academe, there was just recently a salvo of dissension. Do read this exerpt, from the Morung Exress:

One week after two American linguists “uncovered a hidden language” in Arunachal Pradesh, an academician based in that frontier state said his post-doctoral book in 2008 dealt extensively with the Koro dialect.
But Gibji Nimachow would rather not stake any claim to discovering Koro, which he insists is a dialect and not a language as Americans K. David Harrison and Gregory D.S. Anderson announced.
Anderson is the director of Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Salem, US, and Harrison is a linguist at the Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. They claimed to have uncovered Koro during a trip to Arunachal Pradesh in 2008.
Nimachow, an assistant professor of geography at the Rajiv Gandhi University near Itanagar, should know. He belongs to the Aka tribe that is divided into two sub-groups – Hrusso and Koro. Besides, he had between 2004 and 2008 researched on all aspects of his tribe for his thesis.
“To say one has uncovered a language known to many in our reasonably educated state is a bit too much,” Nimachow said. “That is half as ridiculous as turning a dialect into a language, although the Koro dialect is distinct from the Hrusso dialect, as I had mentioned in my book.

One wonders, if in the tradition of scholarly ribbing, whether the yea and nay will continue...