Kamal Ghorui
Margherita: In upper Assam, the election season arrived with loud promises of roads, jobs, and development, but in the villages inhabited by the Tai Khamyang, Tai Phake, and Singpho communities, the deepest anxiety seemed to linger in the silence. It lived in fading words, interrupted lullabies, and children answering their grandparents in a language not of their ancestry.These three small communities, rooted in migrations from present-day Myanmar and China centuries ago, said their biggest poll issue is the preservation of their mother tongues and identity.The Singpho language has around 10,000 speakers in Assam. Their leading citizen in Margherita, a small town close to Arunachal Pradesh, Manje La said their numbers were too small to decide who would become the MLA or who would form the govt. “We want an autonomous council to protect our identity, language, culture, and traditions. We also want an upper house in the Assam assembly, where smaller communities like ours could be represented through nomination,” Manje La told TOI.In Margherita, where the largest concentration of Singpho people lives, the language still survives in homes, but mostly through oral teaching. The community is striving to pass its language on verbally. “Without formal introduction in schools, the future remained uncertain. Singpho uses Roman script, and we insist the next govt bring the language into classrooms,” Manje La said.Linguist Palash Kumar Nath of Gauhati University warned that all three languages were moving steadily toward extinction. “Each of these three languages carries with it a rich repository of ecological wisdom, oral history, ritualistic practices and indigenous knowledge systems that have evolved over centuries,” he said.He pointed to the National Education Policy 2020 as a real opportunity. “Govt must act by introducing these languages in primary education, supporting community-driven documentation, investing in teaching materials, and building digital archives,” Nath added.In Namphake village of Naharkatia, the Tai Phake community carried a similar worry. With only around 2,000 speakers, they had begun efforts in 2018 to teach the language to younger generations, but the pandemic interrupted that momentum. Paim Thee Gohain of the Tai Phake Language Study and Research Centre said children still learn the language through prayers, folk songs, and rituals, but without textbooks and school support, the effort is weakened. “Tai Phake should be introduced in schools in at least nine villages across Dibrugarh and Tinsukia,” he said.The Tai Khamyang faces an even sharper crisis. Though their population is around 4,000 across Tinsukia, Charaideo, Jorhat and Golaghat districts, the language now survives mainly among about 300 people in Pawaimukh Khamyang Gaon in Tinsukia. Pyoseng Chowlu, secretary of the All Assam Tai Khamyang National Council, said the language had been moving towards extinction over the past two generations, pushed aside by the dominance of larger languages. “Many speakers now insert only one or two Khamyang words while speaking in Assamese. A language that once fully lived has been reduced to fragments,” he rued.
