# Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (Third Edition)/India and the Himalayan chain

​India and the Himalayan chain
Stuart Blackburn and Jean Robert Opgenort
India and the Himalayan chain are home to one of the most intricate ethnolinguistic mosaics in the world. India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are dominated by Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Nepali, although several major Dravidian languages are spoken in South India and parts of Sri Lanka. These official, literary and scripted languages are not threatened. Most of the endangered languages in the region are the 180 or so Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by small communities clustered along the Himalayan chain, and extending down the India–Myanmar–Bangladesh border. Several Dravidian and a few Indo-Aryan, Austro-Asiatic and Daic languages spoken mostly in central, eastern and north-east India are also under threat. With a few exceptions, these endangered languages are without official status, a literary history, a script or sufficient state support.
We have extended the list of only 17 languages reported as under threat in this region in the second edition of this Atlas to a total of almost 300. Of these, more than 100 have been classified as vulnerable, almost 100 as definitely endangered, approximately two dozen as severely endangered, 40 or so as critically endangered and 10 as extinct. However, because reliable data concerning both their health and the number of speakers are not always available for many of the smaller languages, our classifications should be treated as provisional. In addition, a few languages classified as vulnerable might more accurately be described as 'stable but potentially endangered', as suggested by Krauss (2007). Most of these are languages with a comparatively large number of speakers such as Bodo, Khasi, Tamang and Ho. For languages beyond our own research (supplemented by that of colleagues), we have drawn primarily on figures reported in national censuses, the Ethnologue online database, the published work of George van Driem (1991, 2001, 2007a, 2007b) and unpublished data from Udaya Narayana Singh. These ​sources are often at variance with each other, however, and the census figures may sometimes appear inaccurate. For example, although Dura is, according to our data, extinct, the 2001 Nepalese census lists more than 3,000 speakers.
Nepal
Nepali, the official language of Nepal, is the mother tongue of more than 11 million people and the lingua franca throughout the country. Whereas the position of Nepali and three other regionally important Indo-Aryan languages (Awadhi, Bhojpuri and Maithili) is safe, more than sixty other languages are at risk. Several Indo-Aryan languages with a small number of speakers (Danuwar, Darai, Darma, Kumale and Majhi or Bote) are severely endangered because those speakers are rapidly adopting Nepali. The Dravidian language Dhangar and the Austro-Asiatic (Munda) language Satār have larger number of speakers but are also vulnerable.
The many Tibeto-Burman languages are at various stages of endangerment. We list more than forty vulnerable or definitely endangered languages, more than a dozen severely or critically endangered languages and one extinct language. The smallest and most endangered Tibeto-Burman languages (Barām, Dumi, Hayu, Sām and Yakkha) have very few speakers and are on the verge of extinction. Newar has around 825,500 speakers but is still endangered since it is losing out to Nepali.
■ ■Changing language politics
In Nepal, reasons for the present decline of minority languages include lack of state encouragement and the simultaneous cultivation of a national identity based on Nepali. From the unification of Nepal in the late eighteenth century up to the 1990s, the government promoted monolingualism and suppressed the rights of linguistic minorities. After the People's Movement brought an end to absolute monarchy in 1990, the new Constitution acknowledged the multilingual character of the country; it declared that Nepali was 'the official language of the nation' and that minority languages were 'national languages' (the distinction between these terms was not entirely clear). Article 18 of the new Constitution also allowed communities the fundamental right to promote their own language and to use it as the medium of instruction at primary-school level, but failed to provide any institutional support.
Since 1990, activists within minority communities have been freely promoting their languages in the media and through various campaigns in order to increase cultural awareness and literacy. The new freedoms have given rise to numerous newspapers, magazines and broadcasts in minority languages. In spite of these efforts, however, activists have had limited success in protecting endangered languages. Many of them are giving way to Nepali as the language of civil administration, law, commerce and the media. The right to operate schools remains mostly unexercised. In brief, state support for minority languages has been largely symbolic.
Since the 2006 Democracy Movement against the monarchy and the adoption of an Interim Constitution in 2007, linguistic minority groups have been given additional rights to use their mother tongue in local organizations and government offices. In Nepal today, there is an ongoing debate about local autonomy and language use in areas where minorities are the dominant population. In the long run, this may lead to a Swiss-model federal system in which minority languages are used in local government.
Dzongkha, which has a direct linguistic relationship to modern Tibetan, is the official national language of Bhutan. Although it has approximately 160,000 speakers, it is marginalized by the extensive use of English throughout Bhutan and by Nepali, which is spoken in much of the south of the country. The official newspaper, Kuensel, publishes Dzongkha-, Nepali- and English-language versions.
None of the several Tibeto-Burman languages in Bhutan is considered to be safe. Although the sociolinguistic situation in Bhutan is more stable than in Nepal, all languages are threatened, and the use of the mother tongue among minority populations is declining. We list half the native languages as vulnerable and the other half as definitely endangered. All but two languages have fewer than 40,000 speakers. According to van Driem (2007 a, p. 294), Lhokpu is 'the most endangered language in Bhutan, which is threatened by linguistic assimilation to the surrounding communities of Nepali colonists in southwestern Bhutan', and 'the least endangered language in Bhutan is the Tshangla or Shâchop language'.
India
Endangered languages are spoken in every state in India, but they cluster in two main regions — north-east and central-east India — where 'tribal' populations dominate. Of the 170 or so languages under threat, more than half are Tibeto-Burman languages in north-east India (mostly in Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland) that are reported in this Atlas for the first time. Other endangered languages include two dozen Austro-Asiatic languages spoken in eastern India and the Nicobar Islands, about one dozen Tibeto-Burman languages in the western Himalayan states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, nearly two dozen Dravidian languages in central and South India, about two dozen Indo-Aryan languages in central and northern India, and, finally, a handful of Daic languages in the north-eastern state of Assam.
The reasons for language decline and possible extinction are not linguistic. These languages are not falling away because they lack a complex grammar or an extensive vocabulary. They are in decline because they are unfashionable and are not transmitted at home, have limited state support and are not taught at school. In India, where languages and scripts underpin regional identities and political power, these unofficial and unscripted languages are at a distinct disadvantage.
■ ■Intervention policy
Languages gain 'official' status only when included in the 8th Schedule of the Indian Constitution. When the Constitution was first adopted in 1950, it listed fourteen official languages, and eight more have since been added. However, the only endangered languages to be granted this official status are Meithei (Manipuri) and Bodo. Meithei is atypical since it is a mixture of Tibeto-Burman and Indic, with a literature once written in its own (now lost) script and in Devanagari (Bengali version) from about 1700. Bodo was approved in 2003, as part of a political compromise to end an insurgency in Assam.
Government support for endangered languages could be further developed at the level of individual states, which is crucial since states determine the medium of instruction and language use in local government. By law, several endangered languages are approved for use in state (or district-level) schools, but few are regularly heard in the classroom. While most of the large, vulnerable languages are taught at ​school, the great majority of them do not enjoy even this modest status in their own communities.
Indian states are free to adopt one or more languages as the official language(s), and several in the north-east have chosen a vulnerable language spoken by a large percentage of the state's population as one of their official languages (Meithei in Manipur, Bodo in Assam, Kokborok in Tripura, Mizo in Mizoram, Garo and Khasi in Meghalaya). The extensive linguistic diversity in Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh has produced a different situation. No single local language is spoken by a sufficiently large percentage of the population to make it acceptable as an official state language. As a result, English alone is the official language in Nagaland and Hindi enjoys that status in Arunachal Pradesh. These decisions also reflect a desire to claim a cultural identity independent of Assam/India/Hinduism. In Nagaland, some Naga languages are taught at school, but mostly in rural areas. A lingua franca, Nagamese, is widely used in urban contexts where speakers of mutually unintelligible languages mix together. However, because Nagamese is a pidgin, deriving mostly from Assamese and Hindi, some people see it as representing an unwelcome degree of Indian influence. English, which is often part of the Christian Naga identity, is thus the default position.
In Arunachal Pradesh, about two-thirds of the total population of just over 1 million people are mother-tongue speakers of one of approximately thirty endangered languages, all of which are Tibeto-Burman (with the exception of Khampti, which is Daic). The other third of the state's population are recent immigrants whose mother tongue is an Indo-Aryan language (mostly Hindi, Bengali or Assamese) and who work as civil servants, businesspeople, shopkeepers and labourers. With Christian conversions and English-language education far less advanced than in Nagaland, Hindi was chosen as the state's official language in 1987. Assamese had been the medium of instruction until the 1970s, but current official policy is that English should be used at all levels of education. In practice, however, Hindi dominates in schools, as it does in government offices.
■ ■Lack of a script
Another crippling fact for most of India's threatened languages is that they lack a viable script. While scripts have been invented (rediscovered and revived) for several languages, very few are used with any regularity in schools or public life. Many of these languages appear in print (in Roman, Devanagari or an invented script) as Christian prayer-books and biblical translations, particularly in the north-east; and this usage may prove to be a lifeline for them. Some threatened languages also appear in the classroom, but they are typically pushed aside in favour of English- and Hindi-language schoolbooks printed in the Latin and Devanagari alphabets.
Lack of a script does not necessarily mean illiteracy. Figures for literacy can be misleading, however, because, first, the Indian census reports the ability to read and write in any language and, second, such ability is self-reported and not tested. Thus, the 2001 literacy rates for north-east India are impressive: 88 per cent for Mizoram; over 65 per cent for Meghalaya, Nagaland and Manipur; 55 per cent for Arunachal Pradesh; and 65 per cent for India as a whole. But they actually reflect competence in Hindi (and/or English and/or Bengali), while speakers of endangered languages remain illiterate in their mother tongues.
Another, poorly studied, dimension of endangerment in India is that loss occurs in stages, as different varieties of speech within that language disappear. Since most threatened languages in the region are spoken by people who practise (or practised) some form of a local
religion other than (but usually mixed with) Hinduism, Buddhism or (now) ​Christianity, many of these languages have a speech variety used by ritual specialists to address spirits. Defined by its esoteric vocabulary, rather than grammar, this ritual speech (or oral poetry) is usually the first level of language to disappear. A second vulnerable speech variety is that used in traditional storytelling because it relies on allusions and tropes, characters and ideas, which belong to a mythic world that is replaced by modernization.
Bangladesh
According to the Ethnologue report for Bangladesh, the country is home to thirty-nine languages, including several varieties of Bengali. With more than 200 million speakers, Bengali (Bangla) is the primary language spoken in Bangladesh as well as the national and official language. Most minority languages belong to the Tibeto-Burman language family and are spoken in the India-Myanmar-Bangladesh borderlands. These linguistic communities are largely concentrated in eastern India or Myanmar, although a significant number of speakers also live in Bangladesh.
Sak and Mru are two severely endangered languages spoken in the Chittagong Hill tracts of south-east Bangladesh. The Sak people are ethnically related to the Chakma, who now speak a distinctive kind of Bengali. The ways of life and cultures of many of the Tibeto-Burman groups in the Chittagong Hill tracts have been under threat for several decades.
Sri Lanka
Of the major nations in the region, Sri Lanka is the least heterogeneous linguistically. Approximately 70 per cent of its 13 million population speak Sinhala (closely related to Indo-Aryan languages in India), while about 25 per cent speak Tamil, a dialect of the language spoken in South India. A very small population (estimated at around 300) speaks the endangered language of Vedda, itself related to Sinhala, but it may be extinct within a decade.
Conclusion
The threat to many vulnerable languages in India and the Himalayan chain is difficult to judge. In many cases, intergenerational transmission is healthy. The majority of children learn their mother tongue and speak it among themselves and to others most of the time. At school and through the media, however, they also learn Hindi, Nepali, English, Tamil (or another dominant regional language); and some children sometimes speak these languages among themselves and with outsiders. A few children, mostly in elite families, use one of these dominant languages at home, but not exclusively. Even when the mother tongue is still spoken fairly widely, it is usually marginalized in the bi- and trilingualism that is the norm throughout the subcontinent, especially among mother-tongue speakers of endangered languages.
Most of these vulnerable languages will probably survive, and will continue to be learned by the majority of children as their mother tongue, for several decades into the future. Others, however, will surely decline, some will hover near extinction and a few will have disappeared by 2100.
People who speak many of these threatened languages in India and the Himalayan chain tell a story about how they once had, but then lost, a script (in order to explain away their illiteracy amid literate and dominant neighbours). It is not at all certain, however, that their grandchildren will command enough of their mother tongue to tell the story of their own language loss in the future.