It is estimated that 90 percent of these remaining languages will die within 2100 AD. On a worrying note, Michael Krauss writes that only 600 languages stand a fair chance of surviving in the long run. As David Crystal aptly expresses, “on average, there is a language dying off somewhere in the world every two weeks or so.” According to Ethnologue, nearly 500 languages have fewer than 100 speakers, 1,500 languages are spoken by less than 1,000 speakers, over 3,000 languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers, and 5,000 languages have no more than 100,000 speakers. In other words, it has been calculated that 96 percent of world languages are spoken by only four percent of globe’s population.
According to the census 2011, Nepal is home to 123 languages that are spoken as mother tongues across several parts of the country. With over 100 languages, our country is rich in cultural and linguistic diversity. These languages belong to four different language families, Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, and Dravidian.
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Among these languages is Chepang, which comes from the Sino-Tibetan family and does not possess its own script. Chepang comes from the word Chyo-bang, meaning stone on the top of hill. Chepang language consists of six vowels and 31 consonants and also includes “Whistle Language” which is occasionally used in hunting. According to Census 2011, almost 71 percent of the total population of Chepangs (68,399) speak it as their mother tongue. The figure was 70.5 percent in 2001 and 68.5 percent in 1991. This language is losing its young speakers at an alarming rate.
For many years, Chepang communities lived a very isolated life in the hills. It was quite rare to meet an educated, or even a literate, person in a Chepang community. They cultivate rice, corn, millet and buckwheat in their fields. They rely on rain-fed agricultural practices for their livelihood, because there is no possibility of irrigation in the difficult hilly terrains they reside in. Hence, there are serious food shortages in the community.
Since the need for food, a basic physiological need, is not fulfilled by their community, they seek alternatives to fulfil this need. Chepang people have started descending to local markets to buy and sell goods. However, people in these markets do not speak or even understand Chepang language. Hence, Chepangs have to switch to Nepali to buy and sell goods. A lot of Chepang children also visit the markets with their fathers and mothers. This continuous process of exchanging languages is bound to impact Chepang children’s language skills. A lot of Chepang youngsters who seek alternative way to feed their families make money through wage labor, which also aids the exchange of languages. It is assumed that the Chepang community’s dependence on Nepali speaking communities is a major cause of the decline of Chepang language.
A research involving 196 students from Navodaya School, Chitwan was conducted to find the relationship between children’s Chepang language ability and other factors. The children were aged 8-18 and were from four districts with significant populations of Chepangs. The children were asked a few close ended questions, and their responses were analyzed quantitatively via SPSS software.
It was found that the language ability of Chepang children had a positive association with the number of Chepang speakers in the family. In other words, the more family members speaking Chepang a child had, the better his/her Chepang language abilities were likely to be. “Nobody in my family speaks Chepang, hence I do not even understand the language,” said Anita Chepang, a respondent from Dhading district.
Similarly, the geographical feasibility of Chepang community inhabitants had a positive relationship with children’s Chepang language ability. Children of more isolated Chepang villages had a better Chepang language ability compared to the ones who lived near motor roads. It has been noticed that Chepang speaking abilities of those families residing near motor roads has declined over time. A considerable number of such Chepang children do not understand Chepang language. However, no connection was recorded between the Chepang language ability of children and the literacy of their parents.
My research suggests that a significant number of young Chepang students do not have any competence in Chepang language, which points towards a further potential decline of Chepang language in the future. According to linguistic literatures, one of the major reasons behind the decline of a language is the inability of elders to transfer their language to the younger members of a family. As per Fishman’s scale of endangered languages (Ranging from 1 to 8 where 8 means that the language is about to die), my research has placed Chepang language on the 6th Stage of endangerment, where the language has some intergenerational usage. This finding is consistent with a previous categorization by Ethnologue of Chepang language as “6B threatened”. Although census 2011 suggests that more than 70 percent of Chepangs speak their mother tongue, the reality is different, especially for younger Chepangs.
The author is a linguist and has been doing extensive research on Chepang language for the last two years
dhrubaadhikary@gmail.com
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