Current ethnolinguistic concerns among the overlooked Thangmi of Nepal
Résumé
In the 1992 Banquet Address to the American Society of Geolinguistics, Roland J. L. Breton spoke of four levels of linguistic development. The first level, in his view, was made up of "the native, ethnic, vernacular mother tongues and home languages, which by a large majority are still restricted to oral use without any written text, dictionary, grammar or teaching ... " (Breton 1993: 4-5). Breton's description is an accurate portrayal of Thangmi, a little-lmown Tibeto-Burman language spoken by an ethnic group of the same name in the valleys of eastern Nepal, and the subject of this article. My own dealings with the Thangmi speech community date to 1996, when I set out to describe their language under the auspices of the Himalayan Languages Project of Leiden University in The Netherlands. While completing a reference grammar of this endangered and hitherto undescribed language has remained the primary target of my research, during my time in Nepal it became apparent that my zeal for phonemic analysis and morphological reconstruction was not shared by many of the indigenous Thangmi with whom I was working. Of more pressing concern to them, naturally enough, were issues of visibility and credibility within the nation-state of Nepal. In the late 1990s, particular concerns related to their ethnolinguistic rights and their growing desire for participation in a national movement which demanded recognition for the indigenous communities (known in Nepali as janajat1) that make up the ethnic tapestry of Nepal.
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