As Gyani Maiya Sen nears the end of her life she worries that her final words may the last ever spoken in her mysterious mother tongue.
The 76-year-old, part of a vanishing tribe in remote western Nepal, is the only surviving speaker of Kusunda, a language of unknown origins and unique sentence structures that has long baffled experts.
“There’s no one else with whom I can speak in my language. I used to speak with my mother, but since her death in 1985, I am left alone,” she said by telephone.
Photo: AFP
Yet the frail, gnarled tribeswoman is the focus of renewed interest among linguists across the world who are trying to ensure her language survives in some form after she has gone.
Sen’s Kusunda tribe, now just 100 members strong, were once a nomadic people, but she has found herself living out her twilight years in a concrete bungalow built by local authorities in Dang District, western Nepal.
“How can I forget the language I grew up learning? I used to speak it when I was a child. Even now, I wish I could talk to someone who understands my language,” Sen said in Nepali.
Nepal, wedged between China and India, is home to more than 100 ethnic groups speaking as many languages and linguists say at least 10 have disappeared in recent decades.
UNESCO lists 61 of Nepal’s languages as endangered, meaning they are falling out of use, and six, including Kusunda, as “critically endangered.”
“Language is part of culture. When it disappears, the native speakers will not only lose their heritage and history, but they will also lose their identity,” Tribhuvan University linguistics professor Madhav Prasad Pokharel said.
“Kusunda is unique because it is not related to any other language in the world. It is also not influenced by other languages,” Pokharel said. “In linguistic terms we call it a language isolate.”
Until recently, there were two other native speakers of Kusunda, Puni Thakuri and her daughter Kamala Khatri, but Puni died two years ago and Kamala migrated to India for work, leaving Sen the sole surviving native speaker.
Tribhuvan University, in Kathmandu, started up a project 10 years ago to document and preserve Kusunda, inviting Thakuri and Khatri to the Nepalese capital. However, as the money ran out, the research ground to a halt.
The project has been given new life by Bhojraj Gautam, a student of Pokharel who recently spent months recording Sen speaking, and gaining the knowledge to speak basic Kusunda himself in the process.
As part of the project, funded by the Australian Research Council, Gautam has written down the entire language and the outcome, he said, will eventually be a Kusunda dictionary and a comprehensive grammar.
Kusunda, incorrectly first classified as a Tibeto-Burman language, has three vowels and 15 consonants, and reflects the history and culture of its people.
“They call themselves myahq, which means ‘tiger.’ That’s because they think themselves as the kings of forests,” Pokharel said.
The origins of the Kusunda people have never been established, but they are believed to have lived in the midwestern hills of what is now Nepal for hundreds of years.
They traditionally rely on hunting to survive and are adept at using arrows and bows for killing wild animals, with lizards and wild fowl being their meal of choice.
Pokharel said Kusundas have no equivalent of the word “green” because the forest-dwellers are surrounded by vegetation and do not recognize greenery as something that needs its own word.
The tribe has been dying out for decades, with women marrying outside the blood line, and the language is perishing with it as many take to speaking Nepali.
“The native speakers shifted to other languages. Factors such as marriage outside their tribe, migration and modernization also contributed to the loss,” Pokharel said.
When King Mahendra dismissed the elected government in 1960 and put in its place an autocratic, partyless system which would govern Nepal for the next 30 years, the use of languages other than Nepali was discouraged.
With the end of a decade-long Maoist insurgency in 2006 and a revived focus on the rights of minorities, indigenous people have started to preserve their language and culture.
While it may be too late for Kusunda, Pokharel said a national institution was needed to try to protect Nepal’s other dying languages.
“Transferring language to a non-native speaker is important and indeed the only way to save it,” Pokharel said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS