Question:Who released the book Tangams: An Ethnolinguistic Study Of The Critically Endangered Group of Arunachal Pradesh?
(a) Sarbananda Sonowal
(b) Pema Khandu
(c) Biplab Kumar Deb
(d) N. Biren Singh
Answer:(b)
Related facts:
- Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu released a book titled Tangams: An Ethnolinguistic Study Of The Critically Endangered Group of Arunachal Pradesh.
- The book will help the future generations of the Tangam community.
Who are the Tangams?
- Tangams are a little-known community within the larger Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh which reportedly 253 speakers.
- They are concentrated in one small hamlet of Kugging in Upper Siang district’s Paindem circle.
- In bureaucrat Tarun Kumar Bhattacharjee’s book, Tangams (1975),the community’s population was pegged at 2,000 spread across 25 villages.
Critically Endangered Language:
- As per the UNESCO World Atlas of Endangered Languages (2009), Tangam — an oral language that belongs to the Tani group, under the greater Tibeto-Burman language family — is marked ‘critically endangered’.
Reasons for Language Loss:
- Cultural erosion is the reason of Language loss.
- Kugging is surrounded by a number of villages inhabited by Adi subgroups such as Shimong, Minyongs, as well as the Buddhist tribal community of Khambas, among others.
- To communicate with their neighbours over the years, the Tangams have become multilingual, speaking not just Tangam, but other tongues such as Shimong, Khamba and Hindi.
- Their neighbours are various Adi subgroups, so they have picked up other Adi languages and their own is slowly disappearing.
Languages in Arunachal Pradesh:
- The languages of Arunachal Pradesh have been classified under the Sino-Tibetan language family, and more specifically under the Tibeto-Burman and Tai group of languages, such as Lolo-Burmish, Bodhic, Sal, Tani, Mishmi, Hruissh and Tai.
- While the education system has introduced Devanagari, Assamese and Roman scripts for most tribal languages, new scripts such as Tani Lipi and Wancho Script have been developed by native scholars.
- Despite there being a plethora of languages in the state, almost all are endangered.
- According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (2009) more than 26 languages of Arunachal Pradesh have been identified as endangered.
- The degrees range from ‘unsafe’, ‘definitely endangered’ to ‘critically endangered’.
By-Amar Mani Upadhyay