Remember back in the day (or last night when you were high) when you thought that pig Latin was a stealthy way to communicate, only to discover that everyone knew what you were saying? Now, CalTech linguistics students want first dibs on a little understood language, Nzadi. It’s the first time a college has studied the language.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

"There's nothing like the joy of discovering a language from scratch," said Cal linguistics Professor Larry Hyman.

The 10 students in his course, Introduction to Field Methods, are focusing on Nzadi this semester - the first such effort in any college or university to examine this remote member of the Bantu linguistic family.

"It's a chance to study a language that nobody has studied before," said graduate student researcher Thera Crane. "That opportunity does not come around very often."

Nzadi is spoken by thousands of people in fishing villages along the Kasai River in Congo, a country with about 220 languages.

The students in Hyman's class have two goals. They want to figure out how to analyze an unfamiliar language and they plan to document Nzadi - a tongue so unknown that it cannot be found in the Ethnologue, a compendium of almost 7,000 languages across the globe.

So you think a language that most won't understand is an impractical waste of time? Consider this: if the CalTech kids want to tell secrets in public any time soon, it shouldn’t be too difficult. They can just break out the Nzadi to break out the stealth and forget about that pig Latin bullshit.