While I was trekking in Langtang last week (it was great!), we sort of adopted another group’s guide for a couple days. He was a cheery guide from the east of Nepal. His business card lists the languages he speaks as English, German, and Korean. I spoke Nepali with him, and I’m sure he at least understands Hindi from watching films and TV. His first language is Bantawa Rai, the largest of the Rai group of languages from eastern Nepal, but he grew up close to the Puma (Rai) community, so he also speaks Puma.
I was surprised to hear that. The last census (2001) counted 4,310 speakers of Puma, which was the subject of a big documentation project a few years ago. It’s likely that the last census under-counted the number of speakers, but it’s still a very small language. Ethnologue says that the language is mostly spoken by adults – this trekking guide is in his 20s, though, so it can’t be entirely old speakers.
In a census, though, this trekking guide I met would probably have counted as a Bantawa speaker (371,000 speakers in the last census) and not as a speaker of Puma. Nepal is a country where many people speak many languages, including their own first language and the languages of neighboring ethnic groups, and where many of the small languages are endangered. But if there are second-language speakers of those endangered languages, just how endangered are they? Does the monolingual mindset of many of the people making noise about endangered languages obscure ground realities where there may be few first-language speakers of a language, but a much larger number of speakers who identify with another linguistic group. What would a significant number of second-language speakers of an endangered language mean for the endangerment status of that language?
Celeste
I didn’t realize you had a blog! I knew you were in Nepal… but as soon as you commented on mine, I read yours!
Have you read “A Suitable Boy”?. It’s kind of a behemoth, but wonderful! It’s set in India, but it reminds me so much of Ethiopia. Wonder if you’d think of Nepal. It seems like there are some similarities across developing countries– despite having very different cultures.
Sounds like you are doing tons of interesting things in Nepal. What are you going home to study?
As for mapping, I’ll keep you posted as I figure out if/how it works!
xox
miranda
I’m going to start in on a PhD in Educational Linguistics at UPenn, so a nice combination of linguistics, education, and anthropology that should let me keep doing things related to what I’m doing right now.
I love expansive Indian novels! And they often do remind me somewhat of Nepal.