I saw the predicament dream
My father or my grandfather knew many pure Bantawa words, Bantawa language, culture and tradition but I don’t know that kind of words even I tried. This means our Bantawa language and culture are going to vanish day after day.–Sujan Rai, the dreamer.
When Bantawa native mother tongue is slipping day by day from Rai Bantawa lingual people, It compelled to think months about…–Dik Bantawa.
Language Death…
Language death is a crisis of global proportions. Some linguists estimate that in a century, half of the world’s 6000 languages will have ceased to be spoken (Crystal 2000). These are startling projections, but what do they mean? How does a language die? Sometimes a language dies with a people, because of natural disaster or genocide, but more often we see a process that linguists have named “language shift,” which is when the speakers of a language cease to speak their mother tongue, often in favour of a new national or global language (e.g. the many Native American languages that are spoken by only a few elders of the tribe).
…in Nepal
Nepal, with its mountain valleys and varied terrain, is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Among the Kirant Rai caste, Bantawa language is mostly spoken by Rai people in the Eastern part of Nepal, Darjeeling and Sikkim of India and in Bhutan. Bantawa Rai language is one of the more widely spoken Rai languages.
Unfortunately falls into the category of endangered languages. The situation of Bantawa language is just as bleak socio-linguistically as numerically. These factors contribute to language die–being fashioned, voluntary or forced migration outside the homeland area, the language used in school, modernization, industrialization, and globalization. These occur in Bantawa and apply especially to the more accessible areas like the town and gradually toward villages. There has been a mass migration of people towards the town as well as Nepali speaking Hindu castes. Perhaps most crucially, all the schools in the area, public and private, taught in Nepali or English medium.
Rai Bantawa is an endangered language. It has ceased to learn fluently by the junior people and almost entirely lost or defunct to use in the home. We have lost many core words and grammatical structures. Nowadays, in every home, mother and father influenced by foreign language forgetting the self-native mother tongue. They didn’t know about our culture, customs, and language.
Without governmental support, twenty-five schools started Bantawa language classes at the low grades; 1 to 5, and textbooks have produced, but finding fluent teachers will be hard – in the more accessible areas, the most knowledgeable adults could understand only about half of the words in the first-grade textbook. Dik Bantawa has given great credibility toward language; making four movies in Bantawa language and writing word dictionary, picture gallery meaning, etc.
There has been steady work in describing and documenting Bantawa since 1985 (Bantawa 1993), mostly done by Dr. Novel Kishore Rai and Dik Bantawa and culminating for the time being in the publication of an excellent Nepali-Bantawa dictionary.
We should be self-aware of our mother tongue. Young generations do not give due consideration to our language for the sake of modernization and westernization. But they forget that language is a proficiency skill of them, they must realize that language is our identity, dignity and skill for the exists.
I hope the Bantawa endanger language on this website will prove interesting or cogitable to linguists, the Rai people, or web surfers alike.
Textbook provided by Government of Nepal Curriculum Development Centre; http://cdclibrary.org/elibrary/pages/view.php?ref=771&k=
