Bulletin

Issue: July 2006

News

Song and dance about language loss

Progres is robbing many remote cultures of their languages - and contact with modern technology is doing the same to their musical traditions.

Welcome dance at the Singpho National
Festival in Assam at which Dr Morey was
a guest of honour. Priests in headdress
lead the dance.

However, as a result of the efforts of Dr Stephen Morey, a research fellow at La Trobe University’s Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, the Turung and Singpho speakers of Assam in northeast India may escape that fate.

He has recently returned from a four-month field trip to the area which he describes as a ‘linguistic hotspot’ where perhaps 150 languages are spoken, often by small numbers of people. Dr Morey is one of four La Trobe scholars working there on endangered languages, giving La Trobe the greatest concentration of non-Indian scholars in the region helping with language preservation.

His task is to compile comprehensive documentation of the Turung and Singpho languages, funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, based at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

Dr Morey says the Turung language is spoken in only seven villages, of which he has visited six - the seventh being very remote and consisting of only three families.

During his field trip, a Turung elder suggested how the Turung language could be written. This proposal was recorded by Dr Morey and played to residents in each of the other five villages. The result is that the Turung community is now moving towards agreement on how their language could be documented in Roman script.

Dr Morey returns to Assam in October to continue this project and produce a book in this new orthography, tentatively titled ‘A book for teaching the Turung language’.

He has also been asked by the nearby Singpho people, whose language is closely related to Turung, to assist with its documentation. In particular he is seeking elderly people who still know traditional songs and stories.

‘I have already collected a large number of these. Several, called “Mam Htu Soi Wa”, used to be sung when women pounded the husks off the rice prior to cooking, a task that once took several hours every day. Now machines are used for this work and very few people still know these songs. ‘