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Welcome to The Bantawa Wordlist Site
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| Language death is a global crisis. Some linguists estimate that in only a century, half of the world’s 6000 languages will have disappeared. This would represent not only a significant loss of data for linguists, but also a loss of tools for ethnic groups to express their identity, of historical information, and of ways of understanding the world and the human mind. The global trend of language death is evident in linguistically diverse Nepal, where some 94% of the languages are threatened. I spent three weeks in Rai villages in the hills of eastern Nepal, learning the ethnic minority language Bantawa. Bantawa is an endangered language, and while compiling a basic wordlist, I made observations and conducted interviews on language vitality and the speakers’ perceptions of the importance of their language. In this area Bantawa is swiftly being replaced by the national language Nepali, both in the realms of vocabulary and grammar, and many young people speak English (their third language) better than they do their mother tongue. However, there are the beginnings of some efforts at Bantawa language education in schools, and linguists are continuing to document Bantawa and its dialects. Although I only had three weeks to gather this data, and my research was limited to a few accessible villages, I hope the wordlists and sound files presented here can be of some use or interest to scholars and web surfers alike. Robbie Hart New 7.31.2004: I'm in the process of updating Bantawa: observations of a threatened language. Last week, I added links to my recordings of a Bantawa shaman, and to the first section of my senior thesis where I give an overview of Kiranti languages, including Bantawa. |
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Table of Contents Bantawa: observations of a threatened language |
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