Nepal Lipi - An Introduction to how to read and write

Reconstructing a Constructed Writing System: The impact of acculturation and language politics on the development of the Sirijunga script's typographic representation in eastern Nepal and Sikkim., 2020

The Sirijunga script is an important cultural artefact of indigenous identity for the Yakthung community living in the south eastern Himalayan belt. It is a script that has been overlooked by conventional printing practices, instead developing alongside language politics imposed by their acculturating nations, Nepal and Sikkim. This dissertation provides an original contribution in the understanding of the Sirijunga script's development. There is little existing literature on the Sirijunga script and its development, with the subject often treated as a side note in a larger discussion on the Yakthung language or culture. This dissertation first establishes a history of the Yakthung people, focusing on language politics which limited the space for typographic development and forced the script to fall out of use two times. Then, through a comparative analysis of document marks from the script's three centuries of use, this dissertation analyses the reconstruction of the Sirijunga script through three defined periods. The dissertation concludes with a comprehensive account of the modern Sirijunga script, discussing typographic practice, as well as a review of all current digital Sirijunga typefaces to highlight the need for more and higher quality typefaces in the script. This dissertation is based on sound research and is beneficial to academics studying Himalayan languages and to type designers wanting to cover the Sirijunga script.

1995

Abstract: Despite the extensive work that has been done and continues to take place in the field of literacy in Nepal, it was not until very recently that literacy activity in Nepal was reflected in writing. Increasingly, however, literacy practitioners in Nepal are realizing the ...

Geolinguistics, 2003

The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya, 2019

Bendi Tso completed a Master of Arts in Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests lie in linguistic nationalism, linguistic identities, and language ideologies. Her current research explores how the ideology of 'authentic Tibetanness'-the idea that speaking Tibetan is taken as a claim to be an authentic Tibetan person-has been played out among Chone Tibetans in Kanlho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture by the Chinese state and by Tibetan ethno-nationalists. Her research also examines the ways in which Chone Tibetans engage, mediate, resist, and reject such ideology based on their own linguistic realities and experiences, in history and at present. Maya Daurio earned a Master of Science in Geography from the University of Montana, where her research focused on language maintenance and social-ecological resilience within an endangered language community in Nepal. She has worked for over eight years in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and is interested in anthropological, ecological, and humanitarian applications of GIS. Concurrent research interests include language endangerment and maintenance, traditional ecological knowledge, social-ecological resilience, indigeneity, and mountain geographies. Maya will be pursuing a doctorate in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

Himalaya the Journal of the Association For Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 1987

Volume I contains a review of major grammatical and syntactic structure, with drills and exercises; this material is summarized in paradigmatic format at the end of the book. It would be helpful to a student who controls the basics of the language and who wishes to tackle more complex grammatical structures. Volume 2 contains glossed readings, which are not graded. Two additional works which may be of use to some students are mentioned below, although they are no longer generally available. Hari, A.M. 1971. Conversational Nepali. Kathmandu: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Contains an introduction to the phonemic system and orthography, six conversational lessons oriented toward daily life situations, samples of letters, some grammatical information, and drills. This is usually available in U.S. libraries which participated in the PL-480 acquisition of books published in Nepal, and may be useful to the beginner who must make a quick adjustment to Nepal while simultaneously learning the language.

Bak Manthan: Journal of Society of Endangered and Lesser Known Languages. Vol.1, Issue1. http://selindia.org/the-documentation-of-baram-a-nearly-extinct-language-of-nepal/, 2014

This paper starts with the processes, and methodology adopted while documenting the Baram language. Some issues related to the documentation of Baram and some challanges faced during the documentation period have also been taken into account. We briefly outline the major outputs of the documentation project. As Baram is a severely endangered language, the later part of this article will try to highlight how a seriously language is influenced by a dominant language in its lexicon including morphological and syntactic features. This part will concentrate on some contact-induced changes.

This chapter aims to analyse the use of languages as mother tongues and second languages in Nepal on the basis of data from the 2011 census, using tables, maps, and figures and providing explanations for certain facts following sociolinguistic insights. The findings of this chapter are presented in five sections. Section 1 shows the importance of language enumeration in censuses and also Nepal's linguistic diversity due to historical and typological reasons. Section 2 shows that the number of mother tongues have increased considerably from 92 (Census 2001) to 123 in the census of 2011 due to democratic movements and ensuing linguistic awareness among Nepalese people since 1990. These mother tongues (except Kusunda) belong to four language families: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic and Dravidian, while Kusunda is a language isolate. They have been categorised into two main groups: major and minor. The major group consists of 19 mother tongues spoken by almost 96 % of the total population, while the minor group is made up of the remaining 104 plus languages spoken by about 4% of Nepal's total population. Nepali, highly concentrated in the Hills, but unevenly distributed in other parts of the country, accounts for the largest number of speakers (44.64%). Several cross-border, foreign and recently migrated languages have also been reported in Nepal. Section 3 briefly deals with the factors (such as sex, rural/ urban areas, ethnicity, age, literacy etc.) that interact with language. Section 4 shows that according to the census of 2011, the majority of Nepal's population (59%) speak only one language while the remaining 41% speak at least a second language. Finally, this chapter summarises its major findings and explores the implications for formulating language policy on language use in administration, education, etc. and applying it in academic research.

… adult education case study series, Mumbai, …, 2003

Heidelberg University Publishing (heiUP) eBooks, 2018

Rospatt, for their counsel and guidance. We especially wish to thank the National Archives, Kathmandu, the co-publisher of the herewith newly inaugurated Documenta Nepalica Book Series, for their ongoing collaboration with our research unit and the permission to reproduce facsimiles of Nepalese documents in this volume. The contributors to this volume must be thanked, not only for their work as authors, but also for their patience with the editing process. We also want to thank our colleagues Manik Bajracharya, Rajan Khatiwoda and Christof Zotter for their invaluable help with innumerable scholarly and technical problems and to Frederic Link for his assistance in the copy-editing process. We also wish to express our appreciation to Philip Pierce and Douglas Fear for thoroughly correcting the English and for valuable suggestions. And a final debt of gratitude and appreciation is to the team of Heidelberg University Publishing under Veit Probst and Maria Effinger, including Daniela Jakob, Anja Konopka, Frank Krabbes and Dulip Withanage, for their assistance in the completion of this project. Since this book is available in a searchable open-access digital format, we refrained from preparing an index. As to transliterations, there has been no attempt to impose a uniform system for non-Roman scripts on the contributions to this volume. Since conventions vary from discipline to discipline, decisions about transliteration have been left to the discretion of individual authors.

Contributions to Nepalese Studies, 2008

From the 1990’s onwards, an interesting dynamics within the Nepali speech community is taking place both in Nepal and in India regarding ethnicity within which the issue of language is embedded. The present paper seeks to understand how the languages of the various nationalities3 in the different socio-political realities play a role in asserting identity, democratic values and norms, functions for the aspiration and the agenda of these dynamics. The language politics, policies, and practices vis-à-vis the role of the Nepali language in the contemporary Nepali speech community are examined in the contact, conflict and cleavages among the nationalities in these countries.