Guwahati, Jan 20 (PTI) An 84-year-old man is the last known barrier between one of Assam’s indigenous languages and its complete extinction, as audio, video and textual records of three critically endangered tongues of the state have now been digitally preserved.
Bhogeswar Thomung, a resident of Assam’s Tinsukia district, is believed to be the only person fully proficient in the Khamyang language — able to speak, read, write and comprehend it in its entirety.
The digital preservation has been carried out under the ‘Endangered Language Programme’ (ELP), aimed at preventing vulnerable languages from vanishing altogether, those associated with the project said here on Tuesday.
“Language is a big asset. It brings people together and binds them like a family. We need to preserve languages that are fading away,” Thomung said while speaking at the unveiling of the digitised archives.
Besides Khamyang, the first phase of the initiative has documented Tai Phake and Singpho — all belonging to the Tai linguistic family — under ‘Digitising Assam’, a community-driven digital archiving programme led by the Nanda Talukdar Foundation with institutional support from an Assam Jatiya Bidyalay-run trust.
Sponsored by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), the programme focuses on digitising manuscripts, vocabulary, oral traditions and visual records to preserve these languages for future generations.
“The ELP is a movement to safeguard languages facing extinction. Similar digitisation exercises will be undertaken for other languages after consultations with community leaders and stakeholders,” AASU chief advisor Samujjal Kumar Bhattacharyya told a press conference.
AASU president Utpal Sarma said all three languages are vulnerable, with UNESCO listing Khamyang as ‘Critically Endangered’.
“Khamyang is in the most precarious condition. Today, Thomung is the only person fully proficient in it,” Sarma said.
He noted that while the Khamyang population is estimated at 1,000–1,400, Tai Phake at around 2,000 and Singpho at nearly 9,000, functional use of these languages has declined sharply, particularly among the younger generation.
Chief advisor of the ELP and linguist Palash Kumar Nath said dwindling numbers of speakers inevitably lead to shrinking vocabularies. “It is essential to preserve these languages at the earliest,” he said, citing the extinction of the Ruga language spoken by a section of the Garo tribe.
“I began working on Khamyang in 2014, when there were four proficient speakers. Now, only Bhogeswar Thomung remains,” Nath added.
A Buddhist ‘pathek’ (priest) from Pawaimukh village near Margherita, Thomung said the language is not difficult to learn. “Two hours of study for three months is enough,” he said, expressing willingness to teach, but lamenting the lack of interest. He had once run a school where Khamyang was the medium of instruction.
Bhattacharyya said the ELP would go beyond documentation to explore ways of reviving the languages. “Keeping these languages alive and in use is also part of our mission,” he added.
The eight-month-long programme combined field documentation with laboratory-based digitisation, and the archived material is now available on the website assamarchive.org.
For Khamyang, 650 manuscript leaves have been digitised, along with 250 curated photographs capturing cultural practices, lifestyle and community memory. Audio documentation covers around 540 high-frequency words and phrases.
In Tai Phake, nearly 19,950 manuscript leaves were digitised, including classical texts such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, along with 350 curated photographs and audio records of over 675 core lexical units.
For Singpho, old books and printed literature were digitised as original manuscripts no longer exist. The archive also includes 450 curated photographs and over 350 recorded speech units encompassing vocabulary, narratives and contextual oral knowledge. PTI SSG NN
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