By Felix Antony –
Neotan: Wanglung Mossang, a Catholic farmer from a small village in Changlang District of Arunachal Pradesh, is conducting evening classes to college students and graduates to give a writing system to his tribal dialect.
“There are so many dialects spoken in Arunachal Pradesh. The Tangsa tribe alone has more than 40 sub-tribes with each having its own dialect without written form. All of them use Roman script” says the 55-year-old from Neotan village under Miao subdivision. “My aim is to preserve our Tangsa language, which according to a recent study is marked as an endangered language”.
The Catholic Church in North-East always supports the promotion of tribal culture and dialects. And this initiative would certainly help to offer mass and other prayers in Tangsa language.
The first day of evening class began on 28 June with 15 college graduates at Newman School in Neotan village. “I am happy that many of our college graduates are attending this 15-day langue course. Once they learn the script they can teach their younger ones in their neighbourhood”, says Wanglung.
The work of a common script for the Tangsa tribe began in 1990 by Lakhum Mossang. However, his untimely death in 2020 brought an abrupt halt to his years of hardwork, sacrifice and research efforts. Thanks to Wanglung Mossang, the pioneering work of Lakhum Mossang has picked up momentum once again.
“Initially the script was meant only for the Mossang sub-tribe. However, in a historical meeting attended by all the sub-tribes of Tangsas on 2 November 2019, the script was unanimously accepted and declared as the common Tanga Script” recalls Wanglung.
The Tangsa Script has 48 vowels and 31 consonants. There are four different tones and words have different meaning according to tones. Reacting to this positive development, Stephen Morey, a well known linguistic research scholar and professor from Australia said, “It is a great step forward, so exciting to be learning about a script, a whole system of writing, created by an inspired person and being taught by community members like Wanglung Mossang so committed to preserving their unique culture”.
“The script is not only beautiful to behold but entirely suitable for the language”, added Morey, a person largely responsible for converting the handwritten script of Lakhum Mossang to Lakhum Tangsa Script font style in Microsoft Word.
The script has been approved for inclusion in the next version of Unicode, an international encoding standard for use with language and scripts, by which each letter, digit, or symbol is assigned a unique numeric value that applies across different platforms and programmes.
All the students reacted with positive enthusiasm at the end of the first day of learning. “We have been speaking in our dialect but writing it in English. Finally we can speak and write in our own dialect and it is a proud feeling”, said Blessy Mossang, a teacher in a private school in the district.
Though developed only recently, the Tangsa Script is already converted into a mobile application to attract young people and students to learn the script. “The Tangsa Script is great unifying factor. The gap resulting from the language variations among all our Tangsa sub-tribes has been bridged by this script. Though we may speak differently, with this common script we can now read and write in one voice”, said Nemsi Mossang, a teacher from the Government School in the village. “I will use my lock down time to teach this script to at least five children in the coming days”.
With this script development, the Tangsa tribe becomes only the third tribe to have its unique written script among more than 50 dialects spoken in the State – Khampti and Wancho being the other two. While Khampti script is a traditional one in use for 100s of years, the Wancho script was invented by Banwang Losu, an inspired youth from Longding district, since the early 2000s.
“Many young people of various tirbes in the State do not speak their own mother dialect. In the absence of a proper script, there is a danger of these beautiful dialects getting completely forgotten. May our humble efforts to preserve our dialect inspire others across the State”, hopes Wanglung.
The Tangsa tribe, a scheduled group under the Indian Constitution, is the largest group in Changlang district, with an approximate population of one lakh.