Textbook relief to 'dying dialects' of Arunachal Pradesh

The cartoon characters on TV or lack of a common language are not the only reasons why many children in Arunachal Pradesh don’t speak in their mother tongue, even at home.

Lack of own script or textbooks in mother tongue has been blamed more for children speaking only in Hindi. This growing trend has posed a threat of extinction to the mother tongue of most of the 26 major tribes and over 110 sub-tribes having their own languages and dialects.

Civil society organisations belonging to at least eight such tribes/sub-tribes, however, has recently come up with a solution by releasing textbooks in their mother tongue, which would very soon be taught in the schools as the third language.

English and Hindi are now the medium of instructions in schools in Arunachal Pradesh.

The textbooks in Nyishi, Wancho, Galo, Tagin, Kaman, Tawra~, Idu and Tangsa, which were prepared by civil society organisations belonging to the communities and verified by the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) were released recently. The textbooks would soon be made available in the upper primary schools (class VI to VIII) in the state.

The textbooks of Wancho and Tangsa has been prepared in their independent scripts while the same for the rest of the six tribes/sub-tribes are in Roman. Most of these languages have been identified by UNESCO as endangered.

“This is the for the first time that textbooks have been released by the government in dialects. This is a very significant development given the fact that many dialects in our state are slowly dying or facing the threat of extinction due to a lack of their own script or textbooks. This is also the biggest reason why children now don’t speak in their own mother tongue, even at home,” Banwang Losu, a school teacher and a linguist belonging to the Wancho tribe told DH. “The textbooks of other subjects like mathematics or science will also be translated into Wancho soon,” said Losu, who developed an independent script for the Wanchos. He also put the Wancho script in the US-based Unicode Consortium for its use on the Internet.

Wancho, a Tibeto-Burman community, numbering about 56,000 lives in the Longdeng and Tirap district (close to the China border) and parts of Assam, Nagaland, Myanmar and Bhutan. “For me, it's a dream come true as children now can read, write and speak our own language,” he said.

An official in the SCERT, who was part of the project, told DH that they were trying to encourage the community-based organisations to similarly develop textbooks for other tribes/sub-tribes. “We are trying very hard as the New Education Policy has made it compulsory that education till class V must be in mother tongue only,” the official said.

Johakso Manyu, a linguist and chairman of Tawra~ Language Development Committee said Tawra~ is one of the three sub-tribes of the Mishmi community and the textbooks were prepared to save the language and ensure that it is passed on to the next generation. Tawra~ has about 20,000 to 23,000 population and lives mostly in Lohit and Anjaw district.

Wanglung Mossang, a Tangsa script promoter from Changlang district said teaching and learning of the dialects would also help revive the forgotten folklores and the rich tribal songs and customs.

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