Rethinking Tibeto-Burman: page 3
Living Tibeto-Burman: the dynamism of Thangmi
Articles in the popular and academic press inform us that the world’s
endangered languages are dying out. There are books devoted to language
death (Crystal 2000) which attempt to find a mathematical basis for
predicting the inevitable decline of indigenous and unwritten languages
in the face of the juggernaut of national and international, written
and official languages. This portrayal is symptomatic of a simplistic
and backwards-looking fatalism which dictates that progress necessarily
challenges traditional socio-linguistic life when the reality is often
more complicated. There are signs of hope amidst the otherwise grim
visions of language decline and extinction, as illustrated by the following
example.
In contrast to the Thakali case outlined above, 19,000 of the around
30,000 ethnic Thangmi population of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in eastern
Nepal still speak their Tibeto-Burman language as a mother tongue. In
many of the remote villages where Thangmi is spoken, the language is
still vibrant and growing even while it is being eroded elsewhere by
the widespread use of Nepali. There are numerous signs of linguistic
vigour and life: new songs in the Thangmi language, Thangmi first names
replacing the Hindu Krishnas and Shantis which were so prevalent among
the previous generation, and Thangmi neologisms coupled with an indigenous
desire to preserve oral traditions narrated in the mother tongue.
Specific examples of activities which help to reinvigorate the Thangmi
language include parents giving their children names of culturally-important
plants and animals, or of well known Thangmi shamans from times past,
and Thangmi men and women creating new Thangmi words, such as the intentionally
ironic ban-pali (friend-pl) for ‘Maoists’, or wakhe-badi
(voice-box) for ‘radio’ and mesek-ban (eye-friend) for ‘spectacles’.
If these neologisms catch on, and many do, they may quickly become adopted
by whole hamlets of Thangmi speakers.
On the language documentation side, there are at least three Thangmi
individuals pursuing dictionary projects. Their focus has been exclusively
on word collection or lexicon hunting and they compete with one another,
and with foreign linguists such as myself, about how many words they
have collected. Some are more rigorous than others, and word counts
can be artificially bolstered by incorporating a massive number of loan
words from Nepali.
The real search, however, is for a script, which Thangmi language
activists hope will validate their claims to antiquity and autochthony.
While most Thangmi are reconciled to using a slightly modified form
of the Devanagari script to write their language, and sensibly believe
that they never had their own unique writing system, some of the more
militant members of the community are eager to unearth any indication
of a uniquely Thangmi script. It is often said that the Thangmi language
once had its own script but has since lost it, a kind of fall from linguistic
grace. Such a belief reflects the widespread if mistaken assumption
that all ‘real’ languages were once written as well as spoken.
Indigenous languages in search of their scripts
The desire for a script is understandable from many perspectives, particularly
when one bears in mind the verdict of Nepal’s National Language
Policy Recommendations Commission. The Commission presented its report
to the government on April 14, 1994, including a four-fold stratification
of languages spoken in Nepal, ranked on the basis of having a written
tradition. At the top, ranked in first position, were those languages
with elaborate and well-attested written traditions, such as Nepali,
Newari, Maithili, Limbu, Bhojpuri and Awadhi. In second position came
languages ‘in the process of developing a written tradition’
such as Tamang, Gurung and numerous others (Sonntag 2001: 169), in third
position came those languages without a written tradition, while the
dying languages, such as Raute, were listed last. In this hierarchical
caste-system of languages, in which script and literacy are placed as
the highest units of value, it is of no surprise to learn that language
development activities by ethnoactivists and language promoters commonly
include the following components: ‘graphisation’ or the
establishment of an orthography and spelling conventions; ‘standardisation’
which is the process of making one speech variety a ‘super-dialectal’
norm, and ‘modernisation’, the extension of the lexicon
to cope with the experiences of the modern socio-linguistic world (Webster
1999: 556). All but eight of the many languages spoken in Nepal as mother
tongues by indigenous peoples have no literate tradition. The lexicalisation
of a language and the development, or resurrection, of a suitable script
or set of orthographical conventions are prerequisites for introducing
a language into education as the medium of instruction, the latter being
a primary aim of many language activists.
A few general issues relating to language documentation and lexicalisation
are worth noting. First, the process of standardisation required for
a pedagogical grammar, textbook or dictionary necessarily results in
a degree of language simplification. Just as divergent spellings of
words and regional variations of speech were constrained by the standardisation
of English grammar and spelling by Samuel Johnson, so too the development
of writing systems for Nepal’s indigenous languages are resulting
in the standardisation of the spoken language and the concurrent elevation
of one speech variety or dialect to a normative position. There are
at least two dialects of Thangmi, for example, and in the process of
developing a suitable writing system and corpus of pedagogical materials
in the language, one variety (or a synthetic mixture of both) will necessarily
be promoted as standard and representative. Given the highly diverse
and heterogeneous ethnolinguistic tapestry of Nepal in particular, and
the Himalayan region in general, the process of linguistic standardisation
can be expected to be complicated. Minority groups the world over will
sooner learn a national language than they will adjust their own speech
forms to resemble that of their immediate neighbours.
Second is the issue of which script to choose or whether to invent
an entirely new one. Various scripts exist within Nepal, the two dominant
ones being the Nepali or Devanagari script, and the Tibetan script.
Other languages with attested pre-existing scripts include Newar, Limbu
and Lepcha (or Lapche). Indigenous peoples speaking languages without
a literate tradition have three realistic options for developing scripts:
Nepali, Tibetan or devising their own one.
The advantage of the Nepali script is that it is widely recognised
and understood by citizens from different ethnic backgrounds, largely
on account of the growing education sector and the boom in print media
post-1990. The disadvantage is that the phonetic basis of the Devanagari
script imposes orthographical constraints on the sounds it is able to
represent. In addition, many of the indigenous communities in Nepal
who speak Tibeto-Burman languages are loath to use a script derived
from Indo-Aryan languages to which their language is genetically unrelated.
The ‘Nepalification’ through script or lexicon of indigenous
Tibeto-Burman languages is strongly resisted by many members of the
ethnic nationalities movement in Nepal.
The advantage of the Tibetan script, on the other hand, is that it
derives from a language in the same language family as many of Nepal’s
indigenous and unwritten Tibeto-Burman languages. Some phonological
features of Nepal’s extant Tibeto-Burman languages, such as tone
or breathiness, may therefore be more easily represented using the Tibetan
script. At a symbolic and political level, ‘Tibetan-ness’
makes reference to a cultural heritage alternative to the dominant traditions
championed by Hindu Nepal. The disadvantages of choosing the Tibetan
script, however, are overwhelming. Most of Nepal’s Tibeto-Burman
languages are very far removed from modern Tibetan, both in terms of
grammar and phonology. Membership in the same language family in no
way guarantees linguistic similarity or the applicability of one script
for all languages in the category. The complex spelling rules of modern
Tibetan are also entirely inapplicable to unwritten languages which
have no classical literary form.
Finally, some indigenous peoples of Nepal are developing new scripts
for their mother tongues. While these attempts are laudable, they are
also often unrealistic given the generally poor level of educational
attainment of those involved in the process and the practical challenges
in disseminating new scripts (publishing outlets, computer fonts, special
schools). There are few professionally-trained lexicographers or linguists
among those indigenous activists working on the development of scripts
or compiling language corpora for these endangered languages. The desire
for a script is an understandable aspiration given the psychological
link often made between script = literate tradition = classical language
= recorded history = cultural authenticity and power. Many indigenous
people across Nepal see the development of a script for their language
as important primarily because of the status that this will accord their
community on the national stage, rather than for any resulting mother
tongue or bilingual education programme that may ensue.
The challenge of finding the ‘right’ script is best illustrated
through an example. Tamang, one of Nepal’s most widespread ethnic
languages, is spoken by over 1 million people or 5.19% of the total
population of Nepal. The Nepal Tamang Ghedung, an ethnic organisation
representing Tamang concerns at a national level, writes its name in
three scripts: Nepali (Devanagari) for the benefit of most ethnic Tamangs
who are functionally literate and have passed through the Nepali education
system; a modified Tibetan script (dispensing with the complicated spelling
conventions) on account of the language’s place in the Tibeto-Burman
language family and also because a growing number of Tamang Buddhists
are versed in the Tibetan script; and English for its international
audience. Such a tri-scriptural approach, while catering to all parties,
is clearly pragmatically unworkable as a long term solution.
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