Field trip to Nepal!

I am going on sabbatical this fall, and I’ve decided to visit Nepal!

Why Nepal?

  1. It sits at the crossroads of several different language families, the two biggest being
    • Indo-Aryan from the west and south, including the national language Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language (closely related to Hindi)
    • Tibeto-Burman (part of Sino-Tibetan, more closely related to Chinese than to any Indo-European language) from the north and east, including Nepal Bhasa, the language I’ll be studying (also known as the Newar language, or Newari).
  2. Furthermore, the mountainous nature of the region, in some ways similar to the famous archipelagos of the Pacific that also furnish great linguistic diversity, helps keep languages separate from each other, all within the same country. There are 14 official regional languages, and it is estimated that there are around 100 different languages spoken throughout the country.
  3. Many of these languages have a rich history and culture of writing. That’s good for a non-phonologist like me! (Unlike my new colleague at notaphonologist.com, I am actually not a phonologist.)
  4. The scripts in these languages are extremely beautiful. Already, the Devanagari script, which is used to write Hindi, is totally gorgeous, but then there are other ones as well. Nepal Bhasa has its own script, Nepal Lipi (alt. Ranjana), which was used in early Buddhist religious texts and was previously banned.Even though it can be written in this more traditional script, Nepal Bhasa is standardly written in Devanagari, just like the Indo-Aryan national language, Nepali. So the kids only have to master two-ish alphabets (Devanagari and Roman).
  5. I am fascinated by numeral classifiers and they are all over this region. In the following picture, the black dots are languages with numeral classifiers. Both Nepali and Newari/Nepal Bhasa have rich classifier systems.

Unofficial reason #6: Via Facebook, I know someone who runs an English-language school for Newar kids in Kathmandu called Modern Newa English School, and he’s very nice.

There are several names for the language that these kids speak (or learn to speak) in the school, which I now usually call Nepal Bhasa. Newari is a name that I have used in the past, but it seems to be falling out of favor. “Newar” is apparently considered more polite than “Newari”. In name “Nepal Bhasa”, “Nepal” really just refers to the Kathmandu Valley; that’s the origin of the name for the country. Bhasa just means “language”. The Tibeto-Burman Newars had settled the area centuries before the Indo-Aryans came. In 1906 Nepal Bhasa was banned from education in the the schools, and many other minority languages were silenced. But there has been a change in policy more recently, and language activists have worked successfully to keep minority languages alive. Now, according to the Constitution of Nepal, 

All languages spoken as the mother tongue in Nepal are the languages of the nation.

 

Although its status is “threatened”, Nepal Bhasa is a healthy minority language, thanks to the dedication of many scholars and activists. It is quite well-documented, with several dictionaries, grammatical descriptions, and digital online resources. There is even a feature-length film coming out this summer. It is a beautifully animated Newar folk tale. I learned about this from the Facebook page of Nepal Bhasa language activist Sunita Junu, who also produced a video of an amazing counting riddle that I am now obsessed with. This will be the subject of my next post.

 

If you’d like to follow along on my journey, you can find my latest posts here.