With only one speaker of this unique language in the country, the Kusunda language is giving an SOS call. [break]
A few years back two people of a single family at Tunibot, Sakhi VDC-6 in Rolpa district spoke Kusunda. They were Puni Thakuri and her daughter Kamala Khatri. Both the parents of this mother-daughter pair were Kusunda speakers.
Apart from these two women, there is another woman from Dang who can fluently speak Kusunda language. She is 75-year-old Gyani Maiya Sen of Dang. Although Gyani Maiya Sen´s mother was from the Magar community her father belonged to the Kusunda community.
With Puni dead and Kamala also leaving for India for employment, Sen is the only living person who can speak the Kusunda language in the country presently.
Prem Bahadur Shahi Kusunda, 78, of Ambapur, Dang knows only a few Kusunda words. Puni is his sister. She was the only Kusunda language speaker who could speak the language fluently. But she died last year.
Gyani Maiya currently lives at Dil Kulmohar near the Arjunkhola stream in Dang and has been making a living by crushing stones into pebbles which she sells to construction companies.
Linguist Prof Madhav Prasad Pokharel and his students are learning the Kusunda language with Gyani Maiya and also documenting it in a bid to keep alive this rare language.
Bhoj Raj Gautam, an M.A. Linguistics student, is learning the Kusunda language from her and recording her experiences in audio tape. He is documenting the language on special software called audacity.
The Kusunda is a nomadic tribe. They used to carry bow and arrows to hunt wild animals and used to live in huts. The male of the tribe used to go for hunting in the wild while the women and children stayed back in the huts and searched for wild fruits and tubers.
It is said the Kusunda people do not drink water from rivers and streams. The Kusunda who refer themselves by the word ´myak´ in their language also do not consume curd. They kill the monitor lizard (pui), wild fowls (tap) and bharse (egamba). They are a short and sturdy people.
Prof Pokharel says so far three vowels and about 15 consonants have been identified in Kusunda language in course of their research. According to him, the Kusunda language does not have any common features with any of the languages of the world. It is a representative of a completely different language family.
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