Bulletin

Issue: July 2005

Research in Action

Remote hill tribe holds a linguistic goldmine

The Khiamniungan only abandoned head-hunting and inter-tribal warfare for peace in the 1960s and many older men still display chest tattoos proclaiming their status as head-takers.

Their penchant for collecting head trophies remains, with displays of animal heads decorating the walls of their homes in the mountain villages of Nagaland in north-eastern India.

But La Trobe University postdoctoral fellow, Dr Alec Coupe, is not so interested in their recently abandoned cultural practices as in their language.

He describes the isolated mountains of the State of Nagaland near the India-Myanmar border as a ‘linguistic goldmine’ where few of the local languages are written and most have never been systematically studied.

Dr Coupe is making the documentation of these Tibeto-Burman languages his life’s work.

He was awarded a PhD at La Trobe University in 2004 for his grammar of one of these languages, the Mongsen dialect of the Ao, spoken by about 70,000 people living in 21 remote mountain villages of Nagaland.

The same year he began a three-year Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate the typology of clause linkage in Tibeto-Burman languages and carry out initial studies on two other local languages, Chang and Khiamniungan.

This project will see his return to Nagaland next October – his sixth visit since 1996 – with firm objects in mind. The first will be to continue fieldwork on the Chang and Khiamniungan languages, the grammars of which are virtually unknown; the second to collect data on other poorly understood languages of the border region.

‘The area in which I have been working on Chang and Khiamniungan was never controlled by the British, who would only dare enter under the protection of a military escort. Since independence it has remained off-limits to outsiders. Consequently little is known about the people or their languages.’

On his first visit, for three months in 1996, he worked on Mongsen Ao for his Master’s thesis. He then spent a year in the region in 1999 and a further six months in 2001 for his PhD research.

During his latest visit, from November 2004 until March this year, he continued his research on Ao to prepare his PhD thesis for publication. He also began his first investigation of Chang and Khiamniungan.

While many of the villages are extremely remote – the most isolated requiring a few days’ walk from the nearest four-wheel drive track – Dr Coupe has certain in-built advantages in overcoming a number of difficulties. His wife, Pavitra Gurung, whom he met in Canberra when he was doing undergraduate study at ANU, is from Nagaland. She still has family and friends there and is his indispensable companion and advisor when he travels in the region.

Her contacts allow them to live in ‘the speech community’ – right among the people whose language he is studying. This means residing in a village house and having as language consultants not only the occasional ageing former head hunter, but often throngs of inquisitive youngsters.

‘Apart from their language, these are a fascinating people who have had a torrid history over the past century,’ Dr Coupe says.

‘They have been converted from their traditional belief systems to Christianity, in some cases as late as the 1970s, bringing both positive and negative consequences to their lives and culture. They suffered terribly in a secessionist war with the Indian security forces after Indian independence. Now they must endure the clashes of rival factions locked in a bitter struggle for political control.

‘The minority languages of Nagaland are becoming endangered due to the spread of the local lingua franca, Nagamese, a pidgin form of Assamese. The loss of a native language can have drastic consequences for a people because language, identity and culture are often inseparably entwined. When the last speakers of a language die, often much more is irrevocably lost.’

Apart from the academic aspects of his work, Dr Coupe says he is helping preserve the culture of the groups whose languages he is studying by developing writing systems and making audio-visual recordings to ensure that their oral histories are preserved. •

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