A language came back from extinction . . . twice

No one knows exactly how many languages there are in the world but the answer should be in the rough order of some 7000 languages. Out of these some dozens will die every year as their last speakers die off and the newer generations learn more popular, more useful languages. It’s quite sad when one thinks of it. But such is the way of the world.

The languages spoken by a vast majority of people as their mother tongues fall in just a few major families like Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic and the like. For these large families, scholars know quite a great deal about the major languages or their respective histories. For the more well known languages there are hundred of millions of speakers. It is unlikely that Spanish or Mandarin are going anywhere anytime soon. Most languages in the world, however, do not have this luxury. Many have a handful of speakers and no literary tradition to speak of. When those few people who had retained a knowledge of their mother tongues succumb to fate, their languages die with them. The stories of these extinctions are consequently always rather sad. Not this one. This is a story of the rather unusual survival of a language: Kusunda language.

Kusunda, spoken by a ethnic group of the same name in hilly regions of Nepal, is a language isolate: meaning that it is not related to any other languages that we know of. Although there were 253 people in the country who self identified as Kusunda according to the latest census (2021), only a handful know their original language to any reasonable definition of fluency. For the death of Kusunda language, it’s eventual rebirth, death again and rebirth again, let us start with the earliest notices of the Kusunda people and their language.

Kusunda is interesting not only for being a language isolate but also for the people of the same name who speak the language. They were, until the twentieth century, hunter gatherers. A question then immediately suggests itself: were Kusundas the first people to inhabit the sub-Himalayan regions. Try as we may, people seem to have a natural tendency to treat language as an analogue for ethnicity (or ‘race’). As their language is an isolate and they were still practicing hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the vicinity of area which had seen some level of urbanization for nearly 2000 years, it is but natural to ask whether they were not the first people there and people who speak Indo-Aryan or Sino-Tibetan languages only later overpowered them. I’d say it is possible that Kusunda or similar languages were spoken before either of the more extensive language families made their way in but also that a simple one to one link between language and ancestry should not always be assumed. I don’t know much about historical genetics but if what I understand of a recent article on their ancestry is correct, Kusundas are not very different genetically from tribal people around them.

Brian Hodgson was the resident of the East India Company at Nepal from the mid 1830s, though he occupied lower roles in the residency starting from 1820. Hodgson was a man of many talents. In his long decades of stay in Nepal, he produced and published an incredible amount of information on local birds and fauna. He might without much exaggeration be called one of the founding fathers of academic study of Buddhism. Beside these he also produced some of the first studies of various languages of Nepal, beside more prestige languages that were written and had literature to speak of, that were spoken by various tribes. He compiled vocabulary lists and tried to point not only the linguistic but also the physical ancestries as well. It is in this context that that we first get any sort of detailed information on the Kusunda people. He first described the Kusunda people, along with a similar tribe named Chepang, in an 1848 article published in The Journal of the Royal Society of Bengal entitled ‘On the Chépáng and Kúsúnda tribes of Nepál’ and begins picturesquely:

Amid the dense forests of the central region of Népál, to the westward of the great valley, dwell, in scanty numbers and nearly in a state of nature, two broken tribes having no apparent affinity with the civilized races of that country, and seeming like the fragments of an earlier population.

“They toil not, neither do they spin;” they pay no taxes, acknowledge no allegiance, but, living entirely upon wild fruits and the produce of the chase, are wont to say that the Rajah is Lord of the cultivated country as they are of the unredeemed waste. They have bows and arrows, of which the iron arrow-heads are procured from their neighbours, but almost no other implement of civilization, and it is in the very skillful snaring of the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air that all their little intelligence is manifested.

Though the words used here are not entirely flattering, Hodgson was not, in fact, unsympathetic to the people themselves as he immediately continues with:

Boughs torn from trees and laid dexterously together constitute their only houses, the sites of which they are perpetually shifting according to the exigencies or fancies of the hour. In short, they are altogether as near to what is usually called the state of nature as any thing in human shape can well be, especially the Kúsúndas, for the Chépángs are a few degrees above their confreres, and are beginning to hold some slight intercourse with civilized beings and to adopt the most simple of their arts and habits. It is due, however, to these rude foresters to say that, though they stand wholly aloof from society, they are not actively offensive against it, and that neither the Government nor individuals tax them with any aggressions against the wealth they despise or the comforts and conveniences they have no conception of the value of.

They are, in fact, not noxious but helpless, not vicious but aimless, but morally and intellectually, so that no one could without distress behold their careless unconscious inaptitude. It is interesting to have opportunity to observe a tribe so circumstanced and characterised as the Chépáng , and I am decidedly of opinion that their wretched condition, physical and moral, is the result, not of inherent defect, but of that savage ferocity of stronger races which broke to pieces and outlawed both the Chépáng and the Kúsúnda tribes during the ferocious ethnic struggles of days long gone by, when tribe met tribe in internecal strife contending for the possession of that soil they knew not how to fructify!

…

That the primitive man was a savage has always appeared to me an unfounded assumption; whereas that broken tribes deteriorate lamentably we have several well founded instances in Africa.

In the rest of the piece, Hodgson goes on to connect the tribes to ethnic groups and ‘races’ according to contemporary ideas about anthropology. He wonders, for example, that though the features of the Kusundas seem to resemble Turanians (we would call this Central Asian today, the language-family as well as ‘race’ of Turanians have been discredited), they are darker in complexion compared to the people around them who speak languages unquestionably of Turanian origin as he supposes Tibeto-Burman languages to be. His attempts at answering this puzzle are interesting but need not detain here us today, except for mentioning that he tries, though not in great detail, to connect them to both the Tibetans and Dravidians at once. Chepang, by the way, speak a Sino-Tibetan language and will be discussed no more.

In the article quoted above, Hodgson had compiled the vocabularies only for the Chepang language. In 1857, he published Comparative Vocabulary of the Languages of the Broken Tribes of Nepal which included the a wordlist of basic Kusunda words. This was, until the 1970s, the sum total of what scholars knew. There had been, in the meantime, occasional references to Kusunda in articles focused on it or in general linguistic surveys but these did not result in much expansion of knowledge. Grierson’s massive Linguistic Survey of India has a small section on Kusunda based mostly on Hodgson which, surprisingly, classes Kusunda in the Tibeto-Burman language family.

In the 1848 article, Hodgson had ended on a prescient note:

The lapse of a few generations will probably see the total extinction of the Chépángs and Kúsúndas, and therefore I apprehend that the traces now saved from oblivion of these singularly circumstanced and characterised tribes, now for the first time named to Europeans, be deemed very precious by all real students of ethnology. Their origin, condition and character are, in truth, ethnic facts of high value, as proving how tribes may be dislocated and deteriorated during the great transitional eras of society.

In the twentieth century, Hodgson’s words might as well be considered prophetic. In 1968, Johan Reinhard^[1] found out a surviving Kusunda speaker named Tek Bahadur during his research in western Nepal. Beside some ethnographic work on the Kusundas^[2], he and Sueyoshi Toba, a Japanese linguist, published a A Preliminary Linguistic Analysis and Vocabulary of the Kusunda Language in 1970 and some other works afterwards.

Some sporadic attempts were made in the 1970s and 80s to search for possible surviving Kusunda speakers but after the death in the 80s of some speakers who had collaborated with scholars, there was not much hope of finding them. Even this aforementioned guy Chudamani Ban Raja was not as fluent in the language as the scholars would like. There were, to be sure, rumours in the capital that there might be some fluent speakers remaining still in remote areas but beyond a few people who could produce a few words, they could not be found.

Kusunda language, it seems, had finally died.

Or so it would seem. Following up on the fieldwork of an ethno-botanist in the late 80’s, linguist Churamani Bandhu had made multiple trips to various parts of remote hills to look up on possible Kusunda speakers. In 2004 NFDIN (The National Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities) funded a project to bring Prem Bahadur Thakuri, who was not completely fluent but had been in contact with Bandhu since 1990, and two of his relatives Gyani Maiya Sen and Kamala Khatri from Dang some 400km to the west to the capital Kathmandu to an academic symposium on the Kusundas.

Though Prem was not a fluent speaker, his two relatives were. Kamala Khatri’s mother moreover was apparently fluent in Kusunda and spoke barely any Nepali at all but couldn’t be brought to the symposium on account of her advanced age^[3]. Kusunda was, after all, still alive.

The result of the studies based on the information by these remaining speakers was the basis of the publication “Notes on Kusunda Grammar: A Language Isolate of Nepal” by David E. Watters, et al, which deals in more detail than ever before on Kusunda grammar as well as providing a larger vocabulary dataset to the scholarly world. Much of the information on the re-discovery of the Kusunda is based on this work which you can find here.

Here’s an interesting video on Kusunda and Gyani Maiya on YouTube.

I have seen it stated in many places on the internet^[4] that the occasion for this surprise rediscovery of Kusunda speakers was that they just happened to be in the capital for some citizenship related issues when found by scholars that they spoke Kusunda. I have not been able to get any source on this and the official publication seems to contradict it completely.

After the first studies, Kamala Khatri had gone to India and her whereabouts were unknown. So, Gyani Maiya Sen was often dubbed the last speaker Kusunda. In 2020, Gyani Maiya Sen passed away at the age of 83. This time, it seems, that Kusunda had finally died.

Well, not so soon. Kamala Khatri, as it turns out, was still alive. She has now returned to the country and is an activist for her language. For now at least, Kusunda is not dead. Surviving in an ICU but alive nonetheless. Since the original symposium in 2005, a steady stream of publications on Kusunda tribe and language has appeared. A project hosted by AchiveNepal offers a free online course for anyone who wants to learn Kusunda language. Some of their video lessons are available on YouTube. They are in Nepali but do have English subtitles. Still better than nothing, I guess. Kusunda language, then, did not actually come back from the dead even a single time, it was just that native speakers had been living all along outside the knowledge of scholars and linguists. But that doesn’t make for a good title, does it?

There have been in recent times some efforts to preserve Kusunda language. Fortunately, Hodgson’s predictions did not come true and his wordlist was not the only knowledge about Kusunda language that we have today. Still, it is unlikely that any native speakers of Kusunda will be left in the coming decades unless the preservation efforts really pay off. So, the wheel of time rolls on …

Hasta luego.

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