The Fairy Language: Language Maintenance and Social-Ecological Resilience Among the Tarali of Tichurong, Nepal

Sahar Tara is a community in Dolpa, Nepal, one of three villages in the world where the Kaike language is spoken. Kaike speakers are called Tarali. The perpetuation of the Kaike language is attributable to the resilience of Tarali livelihood systems and their continued attachment to place. Using informal interviews, participatory mapping, and participant observation, this research engaged Kaike speakers in an exploration of the relationships among their language, environment, and knowledge systems. Tarali negotiate their social and spiritual lives through highly developed adaptive knowledge about the environment, mitigated by natural forces, deities, and intimate historical ties to the land. As explicitly revealed in the story about the origins of the Kaike language, Tarali define themselves and their collective history in the Tichurong Valley concurrent with their conceptualization and cognition of the landscape. This is also expressed in the abundance of Kaike names with which they categorize and compartmentalize their spatial understandings of where they live and work. Tarali situate themselves on their land and in their environment through site-specific traditions of remembering in the form of oral histories and social narratives, highlighting the important role of language in perpetuating these traditions. In this place-based community where one’s livelihood depends on successful interaction with and adaptation to the specific ecological conditions of Tichurong, language acts as a mediator in articulating social-ecological relationships. This adaptive knowledge is transmitted across generations through Kaike and the continued reenactment of ceremonies, worship, and a particular physical and geographical occupation of space. The maintenance of the Kaike language is dependent upon the resilience afforded by this sustained engagement with a place-based livelihood system

Exploring Perspectives on Landscape and Language among Kaike Speakers in Dolpa, Nepal

The majority of the world’s languages are in danger of extinction within this century. Of the more than 6000 languages in the world, 4000-5000 are spoken by Indigenous peoples. Accompanying the loss of languages is the loss of the capacity for these peoples to transmit those aspects of their environmental knowledge systems which are embedded and expressed in their languages. The Kaike speakers of Tichurong in Dolpa, Nepal represent one of these endangered language communities, with approximately 800 speakers remaining. The purpose of this research was to engage Kaike speakers in an exploration of the relationships among their language, environment, and knowledge systems. Collaborative approaches based upon dialogue, informal interviews, participant observation, and participatory mapping exercises formed the basis of the research. Documentation, discussion, and mapping focused on place names and sacred sites as particularly illuminating repositories of environmental knowledge expressed in language. The maps generated in community mapping sessions allowed Kaike speakers the opportunity to articulate their perception of the relationship between landscape and language as well as express their sense of and attachment to place, offering visual mechanisms for transmission of cultural-environmental knowledge. Learning from the experiences of one endangered language community, this project also aids in assessing the larger implications of Indigenous language loss for sustainable development strategies and maintenance of Indigenous knowledge systems

Tichurong (Nepal) - Language Snapshot

Tichurong is an unwritten Tibeto-Burman language spoken by approximately 2,700 people across eighteen villages in the Tichurong valley in the northwestern district of Dolpa in Nepal. It is also known as Poike, Poinke, Rongke, and Tichurongke; it continues to be used in everyday interactions, but differs in usage according to age and gender. It is one of two languages native to the Tichurong valley, the other being Kaike (ISO 639-3 code: kzq and Glottolog Code: kaik1246). Almost all residents of the Tichurong valley also speak Nepali and Tibetan, and some also speak Kaike, making the community decidedly multilingual. Through Nepal’s Language Commission, a sociolinguistic survey of Tichurong was conducted in 2018, and the language is one of 15 recently identified by the Central Department of Linguistics as warranting further research. While Tichurong is unaccounted for in all previous censuses and linguistic surveys, it has been highlighted by linguists studying Kaike. The Nepal Magar Writers Association hosted a study seminar in 2021 facilitated by two linguists to identify prominent phonological and morphological features of the Tichurong language

Mapping Urban Linguistic Diversity in New York City: Motives, Methods, Tools, and Outcomes

Communities around the world have distinctive ways of representing language use across space and territory. The approach to and method of mapping languages that began with nineteenth-century European dialectology and colonial boundary making is one such way. Though practiced by relatively few linguists today, language mapping has developed considerably from its roots yet remains stymied by problems of ideology, representation, and data quality. In this paper, we argue that digital language mapping in hyperdiverse cities can both contribute to overcoming these problems and bring visibility and resources to communities using Indigenous, minority, and primarily oral languages. For these communities, official surveys like the census are often inadequate, leaving a gap that communities, linguists, and mapping experts working in partnership can address. Urban language mapping as a field should make space for Indigenous, minority, and primarily oral languages through geospatial visualization – in terms that the communities themselves recognize and with a public policy agenda. As a case study, we present our ongoing efforts with LANGUAGEMAP.NYC to map the most linguistically diverse urban center in the world: New York City

Negotiating Invisibility at the Epicenter: Himalayan New Yorkers Confront Covid-19

Through audio diaries and interviews, former SSRC fellow Sienna Craig and her collaborators chronicled the experiences of Himalayan New Yorkers during the pandemic. Many Himalayans live in central Queens, the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak in New York City. This essay shares the many challenges faced by the Himalayan community, not least their struggle to be seen as a “community” with its own needs. But it also emphasizes the responses of Himalayans in terms of collective self-help and making claims on city government for attention and essential services

Global Pandemic, Translocal Medicine: The COVID-19 Diaries of a Tibetan Physician in New York City

This article analyzes the audio diaries of a Tibetan physician, originally from Amdo (Qinghai Province, China), now living in New York City. Dr. Kunchog Tseten describes his experiences during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, in spring and summer 2020, when Queens, New York—the location where he lives and works—was the “epicenter of the epicenter” of the novel coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The collaborative research project of which this diary is a part combines innovative methodological approaches to qualitative, ethnographic study during this era of social distancing with an attunement to the relationship between language, culture, and health care. Dr. Kunchog’s diary and our analysis of its contents illustrate the ways that Tibetan medicine and Tibetan cultural practices, including those emergent from Buddhism, have helped members of the Himalayan and Tibetan communities in New York City navigate this unprecedented moment with care and compassion

"Langscapes" and Language Borders: Linguistic Boundary-Making in Northern South Asia

Drawing on examples from the linguistically-diverse Himalayan region, in this contribution we explore three main questions. First, we ask how language boundaries both contribute to and defy the imagination of the nation-state. Second, we investigate how such boundaries are transcended and become redefined through increased mobility and technological innovation. And third, we examine what it means for languages to become detached from the landscapes in which they were traditionally situated and historically spoken. Unfixed and unfixable, languages resist the limitations and constraints of nation-states—both colonial and contemporary-that strive to delineate their boundaries along "clear" and often monolingual lines. In the Himalayan region in particular, plural linguistic identities challenge reductive national logics that seek to bind or appropriate languages for hegemonic and ideological goals. Not only are national borders decreasingly relevant for the maintenance and transmission of languages, but the global dispersal of people and the languages they speak, sign and write are combining with accessible digital media to transform internally-maintained language borders as well