The Endangerment and Documentation of the Pangkhua Language in Bangladesh

Abstract

Global language endangerment and the need for language revitalization are now widely known and accepted. This general trend of language loss is also reflected in South Asia, where, according to Ethnologue (Grimes 1992), out of about 650 languages, 29 are ‘dying’ and 138 are in ‘trouble’. Narrowing down our focus to one of South Asia’s small countries, namely, Bangladesh, we find that some of its minority languages are clearly under threat of extinction. For example, Ethnologue lists 3 Tibeto-Burman languages namely, Atong [aot] (number of speakers-5400), Mizo [lus] (number of speakers 250), and Riang [ria] (number of speakers 500) as ‘shifting’. Furthermore, many of the Kuki-Chin languages of Bangladesh and India including Bawm, Tidim Chin, Falam Chin, Hakka Lai, etc. are fast losing their grounds due to assimilation of their speakers into bigger language groups such as Bengali, Mizo, etc. Against this backdrop, I take into account a relatively small Tibeto-Burman language of Bangladesh called Pangkhua to assess its level of endangerment and to suggest some revitalization measures that might be appropriate in its sociopolitical context. In doing so, I review some of the successful language revitalization efforts implemented in a number of countries such as Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, Hawaii and a few other US states. I conclude the paper by providing a phonological description of Pangkhua and a fragmentary description of verbal morphology in terms of argument indexation.