by: Madhav P PokharelPosted on:

Issue of immigration and its linguistic consequences in Nepal

Long abstract

High regards for non-phonemic letters and keeping Devanagari as a model of the phonemic inventory form the graphological influence of Sanskrit over the newly developing orthographies of Nepalese languages. Sanskrit borrowings in Nepalese languages have a tendency to maintain their original spelling (e.g. length in high vowels) even though the letters do not represent any phonemic values.  Apical and laminal contrast in stops and affricates is represented as dental and retroflex contrast; tonal contrast is represented as four way contrast in stops and affricates in orthography and the inventories of sounds in non-Aryan languages are gradually becoming similar to that of Nepali.

Classifiers, echo words, onomatopoeia and cultural vocabularies of South Asia have become characteristics of Indo-Aryan vocabularies. Blending of Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman roots and affixes in Raji and Chhantyal and the mutual borrowings of grammatical terms and structures across family boundaries are some of the morphological features.

Lack of relative and interrogative pronominals in Tibeto-Burman is compensated by the neutralization of interrogative pronominals in Newari, which is again copied by Indo-Aryan Nepali. Strange agreement pattern in Maithili is also a result of migration.

Although the original homes of speakers of almost all the languages of Nepal are either Central Asia or China, language activists often claim Nepali to be foreigner’s imposition.  Sanskrit is the source of neologism and Nepali is the lingua franca, but both the languages are targets of political opposition while compulsory English is not debated.

 

Short abstract

Although Sanskrit is the source of neologism and the model of orthography and Nepali is the lingua franca, both are political targets. Nepalese languages have developed many phonological, morphological, syntactic features which may be concluded as the results of migration.

 

  1. 1.     Relative chronology of Nepalese peoples

 

Although fossils of Ramapethecus have been discovered in Nepal, none of the human races has been identified as an aborigine, except for the Kusunda who speak a language isolate and whose origin has never been linked outside the peninsula. Research in South Asian chronology has set Austric, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Persian, Greek, Arabic, and Portuguese and English speakers in order, but in Nepal the order seems to be the pronominalized Tibeto-Burman Himalayish and Indo-Aryan. The Bodish group of Tibeto-Burman speakers may have come to Nepal not before the Tibetan unification (7th century). The Austroasiatic and the Dravidian speakers came to Nepal to work in the tea gardens around two centuries ago.

Although the relative chronology of the Nepalese peoples show that all of Nepalese peoples except for the Kusunda speakers, have come to Nepal directly or indirectly from modern Chinese territories, the Indo-Aryan Nepali language speakers are often called ‘immigrants’ by political activists from Tibeto-Burman family background. Such activists usually speak Nepali creole as the first language, most of who are monolingual to Nepali and who have been living in a metropolitan city or urban area, away from their ancestral habitats, totally detached from the real speakers of their ancestral languages.

 

  1. 2.     Relative chronology of peoples in South Asia

 

2.1  Austric

 

The earliest immigrant of South Asia is believed to be the Negrito (1500 BC following Chatterji 1974), a group of people speaking Austronesian languages, who were believed to be related to some of the peoples of the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and the islands of Andaman, Nicobar of Indian Ocean as far as the Madagaskar island of Africa; and whose original home is believed to be Taiwan (Reid, 2007). According to Chatterji (1974: 14) all the riverain tracts of north India and Central Indian hills and jungles were occupied by the Austric peoples.

Although there are traces of an influence of Austoasiatic languages and culture (Chatterji & Bagchi, 1929) in the vocabulary and morphology of Nepalese languages, speakers of Austroasiatic languages Santali, Kharia and Munda are reported to have come to Nepal to work in the tea gardens from Jharkhand not earlier than two centuries ago.

 

2.2  Dravidian

 

The Austric speaking Negritos were followed by the speakers of the Dravidian languages in South Asia. The Indus Valley (3000-1750 BC) script has not been successfully deciphered although there are conflicting claims of their successful decipherment. Asko Parpola (Parpola, 2005), a professor of the Helsinki University has claimed the language to be Dravidian whose original home is believed to be the vicinity of the Mediterranean Sea (Marr, 1975). The archeology of Xinjiang (Mair, 1998) in western China discovers the mummies of the Dravidian people together with that of the Indo-European peoples (Kangxin, 1998).

However, speakers of the only Dravidian language Kurux (Oraon or Jhangad) in Nepal are also reported to have come from Jharkhand to work in the tea gardens about the same time as the Austroasiatic although there are clear evidences of Dravidian culture and language (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and vocabulary) in the Nepalese languages.

 

2.3  Indo-Aryan

 

The Aryan, a branch of the Indo-European speaking people whose original home was in the vicinity of the Ural and the Caspian Sea around the 4th millennium BC (Mair, 1998), arrived in South Asia around 1500 BC from Central Asia (Burrow, 1975). Chatterji (1974, p. 36) has estimated that the Indo-Aryan speaking people entering the northwestern and the Kirata people entering the northeastern parts of South Asia to be roughly the same.

Indo-Aryan is the family of a human language which has the largest corpus of texts of the widest historical span. The Old Indo-Aryan is represented by Vedic Sanskrit (BC 1500-500) and Classical Sanskrit. The Middle Indo-Aryan (BC 500-500 AD) texts (Woolner, 1928) are represented by Asokan Inscriptional Prakrit, Pali, literary Prakrit and Apabhramsha (500-1000 AD). New Indo-Aryan texts are represented by a large number of both written and spoken texts of languages mainly spoken in the northern part of the South Asian subcontinent together with the texts of Gypsy dialects in Europe and West Asia. Nepali is a New Indo-Aryan language.

 

2.3.1        Functions of historical Indo-Aryan dialects in Nepal

 

Modern Nepal makes use of Indo-Aryan languages of all the historical period for various social functions.

  1. Nepali is the official language of Nepal. Nepali has not less than twelve geographical (Niraula, 2051) and many nonstandard and social dialects. During the latter part of the Panchayat system of government the 1981 census showed that Nepali was the mother tongue of about 58% of the population. Soon after the political change of 1999, the percentage of Nepali mother tongue speakers dropped to around 50 percent and in the 2001 census report, the population of Nepali mother-tongue speakers further dropped to about 48%. This gradual drop in the population figures in Nepali is the result of change in the attitude of Nepali speakers who speak it actually as a mother tongue and attitudinally as an ‘other tongue’. If we compare the census data of Maithili, Tharu, Limbu, Newar and Magar against Nepali, we will find that the population of these languages is gradually diminishing from the beginning (1954) until 1981 and gradually increasing after 1981 while census figures for Nepali correspondingly go in the opposite direction before and after 1981. There is a growing denial of the historical status of Nepali among political activists who speak Nepali either a second language or as the first language creole.
  2. In addition to Nepali there are about fifteen other Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Nepal. Maithili has recently been included in the 8th schedule of the Indian constitution; otherwise all other Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Nepal are considered language, but they (Bhojpuri, Awadhi) are considered only dialects of Hindi. Some of the Indo-Aryan languages of the mountains like Churaute and Majhi are gradually becoming almost dialects of Nepali due to bilingualism.
  3. Majority of the Nepalese international trade is carried out through Hindi. Hindi is a trade language, the language of religious Hindu arati, and a language of mass entertainment and media in the plains, urban areas and among so-called educated people. It is often used as a link language among different South Asian citizens while they are abroad. Even along the southern Nepalese urban areas Hindi often acts as a link language among the educated elite. Hindi is declared a formal language of communication among Terai-based politicians. In spite of these important roles Hindi is often treated as a token of political controversy among the pro-and-anti-Indian fanatics.
  4. Pali is used in Theravada and Hinayana Buddhist rituals. The first Nepalese inscription is in the Asokan Prakrit.
  5. Vedic Sanskrit is used in many Hindu rituals. Sanskrit is used in literary texts, most of the Hindu Puranic texts, religious and ritualistic documents, as a medium of academic exercise in the Sanskrit university and Mahayana Buddhist scriptures. In addition to cultural and academic functions Sanskrit serves as the main source of scientific and technical vocabularies for calquing and human and institutional given names and titles in almost all the languages of South Asia. In spite of such obligatory social functions Sanskrit language has been a matter political debate and controversy. It has been tied to former ruling class and Brahmin priests.

 

2.3.2        Functions and issues of Devanagari script

 

Sanskrit remained an unwritten language for more than a millennium until it was transcribed in the Brahmi script in the 3rd century BC. The earliest Brahmi was not adequate to represent Sanskrit phonology. For that adequacy history had to wait until the evolution of Brahmi to Devanagari (8th century). Although there are about seven traditional scripts (Devanagari, Ranjana, Kaithi, Mithilaksar, Lepcha, Sirijanga and Tibetan) to write Nepalese languages, Devanagari has served as the basic role model and gradually other scripts like Ranjana and Sirijanga have evolved to be functionally similar to Devanagari although the phonology of the languages show inadequacy and discrepansies.

Sanskrit universities in South Asia do not teach phonetics although the modern word synonymous for education (शिक्षा) meant phonetics in the Vedic literature. The repercussions of such a convention are such that today every South Asian pundit speaks ‘correct’ Sanskrit using the phonemic inventory of her/his mother tongue. This practice has brought problem of unanimity in correct spelling in Nepali followed by several other mother tongues in Nepal.

Political opposition of Nepali has its echo in the opposition of Devanagari also in some of the newly written languages like Umbule Rai, Tamang, Gurung, Magar and Dungmali although majority of those who can read and write cannot read scripts other than Devanagari. Devanagari is common in the Newar language which has not less than seven different traditional scripts. Introducing phonemic writing system in some of these languages is sometimes difficult, because people plead correct forms of spelling on the ground of their prejudice borne through Nepali.

 

2.4  Tibeto-Burman

 

Grierson (1927) speculates the upper courses of the Yangtze and the Huang-he [which locates roughly the area covered by northeast Tibet, northwest Sichuan and southeast Qinghai provinces of China] to be the original home of the ‘Tibeto-Chinese [speaking] race’. Chatterji (1974:26) has estimated that these people started to disperse from modern Sichuan towards South Asia. Following him we can say that speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages may have reached the northeastern sub-Himalayan region of South Asia during the Shang (1700-1000 BC) period.

 

2.4.1        The Kirāta people

 

The presumably pronominalized Tibeto-Burman language speaking Kirāta people are mentioned first in several of the Vedic (1000-500 BC) texts [(the Vājasaneyi Samhitā (xxx.16) of the Shukla-yajur-veda, Atharva-veda (x.4.14), the Taittiriya Brāhmana (iii. 4.12.1) of the Krishna-yajur-veda) and the Atharva-veda (10.4.14)] (Macdonell & Keith, 1912). Chatterji (1974:58) notes that a Mongoloid ruler named Bhagadatta participated in the Mahabharata war (950 BC) in Kuruksetra. It shows that the Tibeto-Burman people may have occupied the sub-Himalayan caves and mountains of Assam, Bhutan, Nepal, Kumaon and Garhwal by the 10th century BC. On the other hand, Chatterji notes that the Indo-Aryan people do not seem to have occupied the region east of Bideha or Mithila [perhaps to the east of the Kosi River] before 700 BC.

According to the map given by Macdonell and Keith (1912) the so-called Kirata people are shown to have occupied western Nepal in the Vedic period. Here, the name ‘Kirata’ simply means the Tibeto-Burman ‘pronominalized’ language speaking Mongoloid peoples, the predecessors of the present day Kanauri, Lahuli, Manchadi, Chaudangsi, Byangsi, Raji, Raute, Kham, Magar, Bhujel, Chepang and Newar speaking peoples. It is unlikely that the Vedic Aryans (1500-500 BC) could have been the neighbors of the Kirata language speaking populations of eastern Nepal although today the word Kirata only refers to them. Based on Chatterji (1974) we can speculate that due to the continuous and gradual influx of the pronominalized Tibeto-Burman language speakers from Sichuan in South China to the Punjab in northwestern India, the people who are dwelling in the west are likely to have been earlier than those who inhabit towards east in their gradual westward movement along the southern sub-Himalayan settlements.

 

2.4.2 Bodish group of Tibeto-Burman

 

The Bodish or Tibetic branch of the Tibeto-Burman language speakers came to South Asia crossing through the Himalayan passes not before the 7th century unification of Tibet.

The Tibeto-Burman languages have contributed substratum influence in the pronunciation, grammatical structure and some of the cultural vocabulary items over Nepali. There is mutual linguistic influence between Indo-Aryan Nepali and Tibeto-Burman languages (Matisoff, 1990) spoken in Nepal. If we regularly examine the linguistic discourse of the newly introduced Nayan Nepal ‘new Nepal’ column in the Gorkhapatra daily, we will find that Nepalese minority languages have not only borrowed neologisms but also several structural and grammatical items from Nepali.

I have developed orthography in almost 50% of the unwritten languages of Nepal. My experience with the interactions of the Tibeto-Burman mother tongue speakers gives the evidence that bilingualism and language shift have acted to bring gradual phonological convergence (Emeneau M. B., 1956; Emeneau M. B., 1980; Krishnamurti, 1986) among Nepalese languages.

 

2.5  Persian

 

Pakistan was the eastern border of the Achaemenid king Darius (528-486 BC) who ruled over Afghanistan and Sind. Persian coins are the evidence of that rule. Kushana (135 BC-200 AD) and the Parthian or Pallava rules (10 BC) and the movement of the Parasis to Gujarat and Mumbai (800-900) has brought the Avestan (1200-700 BC) culture to India. All these prehistoric and historical movements have had an influence of different groups of the Iranian peoples in South Asia (Cunningham, 1891 [1990]). Rudradaman (130 AD) is the first Iranian king who initiated the Sanskrit language in historical inscriptions in South Asia.

Nepali is often called the Khas kura ‘Khasa’s language’ by the Newars and the Magars. The Khasa tribe is supposed to be a pre-Vedic Indo-Iranian speaking people whose original home is supposed to be Xinjiang and Gansu of western China (Mair, 1998; सांकृत्यायन, 2013). During the Muslim period many Persian words came to Nepali indirectly through Hindi or through the royal courts of Delhi. Not only the lexical items, has the royal dialect of Nepali also borrowed बख्श <bʌxç> ‘to give’ (खाँ ‘मद्दाह’, 1980) as a grammaticalized vector in a compound verb.

 

2.6  Arabic

 

Muhammad bin Qasim’s (711-714 AD) conquest in Sind inaugurated the influence of Arabic language. Muhammad Ghazni’s raids (1005-1026 AD), Muhammad Ghuri’s (1186 AD) and Qutb-ud Din’s (1192-1193) activities in India may have promoted an influence of Arabic language. Urdu Ghazal developed as a separate genre (1723-1810). When the Mongols came to Lahore (1241) and invaded Delhi (1303) some of the Mongolian words like <bahadur> came to be used.  Vasco de Gama’s arrival in Calicut (1498) inaugurated Portuguese vocabulary in South Asian languages. When East India Company set factories in Madras (1641), it generated the use of English language in the peninsula. The French also had their influence in Pondicherry (1673).

There are many Arabic words in legal, administrative and royal vocabularies of Nepali. This may be the result of the indirect influence of Muslim rulers in Delhi.

 

2.7  English

 

Sir William Jones (1746-1794) founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784), translated Kalidasa’s Shakuntala and inaugurated the science of comparative philology which triggered Indo-European scholarship and ultimately the science of linguistics. Fort William College was established in Kolkata (1800) to give instructions to the East India Company’s recruits.

The two century long British rule in India has injected an obligatory kaleidoscopic role of English in education, academics, administrative and social fields of Nepal as a language of South Asia and it has given birth to a wide spectrum of sociolinguistic issues.

 

3        Linguistic issues as consequences of immigration

 

Following are the issues resulted from immigration in Nepal which is a subset of the larger issues of immigration in South Asia:

 

  1. Issue of indigenous and outsider: Although the relative chronology of the Nepalese peoples show that all of Nepalese peoples except for the Kusunda speakers, have come to Nepal directly or indirectly from modern Chinese territories, the Indo-Aryan Nepali language speakers are often called ‘immigrants’ by political activists from Tibeto-Burman family background. Such activists usually speak Nepali creole as the first language, most of who are monolingual to Nepali and who have been living in a metropolitan city or urban area, away from their ancestral habitats, totally detached from the real speakers of their ancestral languages.
  2. Issues related with Kiranti: According to the map given by Macdonell and Keith (1912) the so-called Kirata people are shown to have occupied western Nepal in the Vedic period. Here, the name ‘Kirata’ simply means the Tibeto-Burman ‘pronominalized’ language speaking Mongoloid peoples, the predecessors of the present day Kanauri, Lahuli, Manchadi, Chaudangsi, Byangsi, Raji, Raute, Kham, Magar, Bhujel, Chepang and Newar speaking peoples. It is unlikely that the Vedic Aryans (1500-500 BC) could have been the neighbors of the Kirata language speaking populations of eastern Nepal although today the word Kirata only refers to them. Based on Chatterji (1974) we can speculate that due to the continuous and gradual influx of the pronominalized Tibeto-Burman language speakers from Sichuan in South China to the Punjab in northwestern India, the people who are dwelling in the west are likely to have been earlier than those who inhabit towards east in their gradual westward movement along the southern sub-Himalayan settlements.
  3. Pidginization, creolization and morphological blending: Sankrityayan (सांकृत्यायन, किन्नर देश में [In the country of the Kanaur], 1948, pp. 347-348) cites a blending of Indo-Aryan verb roots and Tibeto-Burman affixes as a strategy of word formation rules in Kanauri. Khatri (Khatri, 2008) and Thapa (थापा, 2008) also note the similar process of word formation in Raji and Chhantyal respectively. This phenomenon may be a result of earlier pidginization and creolization.
  4. Anachronism with Austric and Dravidian: Although there are traces of an influence of Austoasiatic languages and culture in the vocabulary and morphology of Nepalese languages, speakers of Austroasiatic languages Santali, Kharia and Munda are reported to have come to Nepal to work in the tea gardens from Jharkhand not earlier than two centuries ago. Similarly speakers of the only Dravidian language Kurux (Oraon or Jhangad) in Nepal are also reported to have come from Jharkhand to work in the tea gardens about the same time as the Austroasiatic although there are clear evidences of Dravidian culture and language (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and vocabulary) (Bloch, 1929) in the Nepalese languages.
  5. Political impact on the census data: Nepali is the official language of Nepal. Nepali has not less than twelve geographical (Niraula, 2051) and many nonstandard and social dialects. During the latter part of the Panchayat system of government the 1981 census showed that Nepali was the mother tongue of about 58% of the population. Soon after the political change of 1999, the percentage of Nepali mother tongue speakers dropped to around 50 percent and in the 2001 census report, the population of Nepali mother-tongue speakers further dropped to about 48%. This gradual drop in the population figures in Nepali is the result of change in the attitude of Nepali speakers who speak it actually as a mother tongue and attitudinally as an ‘other tongue’. If we compare the census data of Maithili, Tharu, Limbu, Newar and Magar against Nepali, we will find that the population of these languages is gradually diminishing from the beginning (1954) until 1981 and gradually increasing after 1981 while census figures for Nepali correspondingly go in the opposite direction before and after 1981. There is a growing denial of the historical status of Nepali among political activists who speak Nepali either a second language or as the first language creole.
  6. Diffusion of phonological features: Bilingualism and multilingualism in Nepal has changed the retroflex plosives, fricatives and nasal sounds into alveolar in Indo-Aryan languages of Nepal (Nepali, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Rajbamshi, Majhi, Danuwar, Bote, Darai, Churaute). In most of these Indo-Aryan languages even the Indo-Aryan palatal affricates and fricatives have also changed their place into lamino-alveolar. This is a non-Aryan substratum influence over the Indo-Aryan.
  7. Four way contrasts in plosives and affricates: The four way manner contrast of plosives and affricates in Indo-Aryan languages has diffused into several Tibeto-Burman languages like Newar, Chamling, Kulung and Khaling. Even the tonal language speakers are found happy to represent their tones on the model of Sanskrit as in Tibetan.
  8. Issues with Hindi and other Indo-Aryan: In addition to Nepali there are about fifteen other Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Nepal. Maithili has recently been included in the 8th schedule of the Indian constitution; otherwise all other Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Nepal are considered language, but they (Bhojpuri, Awadhi) are considered only dialects of Hindi. Some of the Indo-Aryan languages of the mountains like Churaute and Majhi are gradually becoming almost dialects of Nepali due to bilingualism.
  9. Functions and issues with Hindi: Majority of the Nepalese international trade is carried out through Hindi. Hindi is a trade language, the language of religious Hindu arati, and a language of mass entertainment and media in the plains, urban areas and among so-called educated people. It is often used as a link language among different South Asian citizens while they are abroad. Even along the southern Nepalese urban areas Hindi often acts as a link language among the educated elite. Hindi is declared a formal language of communication among Terai-based politicians. In spite of these important roles Hindi is often treated as a token of political controversy among anti-Indian fanatics.
  10. Mutual influences: The Tibeto-Burman languages have contributed substratum influence in the pronunciation, grammatical structure and some of the cultural vocabulary items over Nepali. There is mutual linguistic influence and borrowings across the language boundaries between Indo-Aryan Nepali and Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Nepal. If we regularly examine the linguistic discourse of the newly introduced Nayan Nepal ‘new Nepal’ column in the Gorkhapatra daily, we will find that Nepalese minority languages have not only borrowed neologisms but also several structural and grammatical items from Nepali.
  11. Features of linguistic convergence: Classifiers, echo words, onomatopoeia and cultural vocabularies of South Asia have become characteristics of Indo-Aryan vocabularies.
  12. Everyday use of Indo-Aryan of different historical periods: Modern Nepal makes use of Indo-Aryan languages of all the historical period for various social functions.
  13. Prakrit languages in Nepal: The first Nepalese inscription is in the Asokan Prakrit. Pali is used in Theravada and Hinayana Buddhist rituals.
  14. Functions and issues of Sanskrit: Vedic Sanskrit is used in many Hindu rituals. Sanskrit is used in literary texts, most of the Hindu Puranic texts, religious and ritualistic documents, as a medium of academic exercise in the Sanskrit university and Mahayana Buddhist scriptures. In addition to cultural and academic functions Sanskrit serves as the main source of scientific and technical vocabularies for calquing and human and institutional given names and titles in almost all the languages of South Asia. In spite of such obligatory social functions Sanskrit language has been a matter political debate and controversy. It has been tied to former ruling class and Brahmin priests.
  15. Relative and interrogative pronominals: Lack of relative and interrogative pronominals in Tibeto-Burman is compensated by the neutralization of interrogative pronominals in Newari, which is again copied by Indo-Aryan Nepali.
  16. Lexical, morphological and syntactic borrowings: Przyluski (1921), Chatterji and Bagchi (1929) have also discovered many lexical borrowings in Sanskrit from Dravidian. They have also quoted Sten Konow’s observation that in ‘Bihari’ [Maithili] verb paradigms and strange and unique honorific agreements in the language is Austric influence.
  17. Lexical and grammatical borrowings from Persian: During the Muslim period many Persian words came to Nepali indirectly through Hindi or through the royal courts of Delhi. Not only the lexical items, has the royal dialect of Nepali also borrowed बख्श <bʌxç> ‘to give’ (खाँ ‘मद्दाह’, 1980) as a grammaticalized vector in a compound verb. The Persian complementizer <ki> is also gradually penetrating through Nepali.
  18. Role of Arabic and Persian words in legal and administrative domains: There are many Arabic words in legal, administrative and royal vocabularies of Nepali. This may be the result of the indirect influence of Muslim rulers in Delhi.
  19. Kaleidoscopic role of English: The two century long British rule in India has injected an obligatory kaleidoscopic role of English in education, academics, administrative and social fields of Nepal as a language of South Asia and it has given birth to a wide spectrum of sociolinguistic issues. Although the lingua franca Nepali and Sanskrit, the language of culture, high status and the source of neologism are often brought to targets of political opposition and controversy, the issue of compulsory English is not debated.
  20. Loss of gender and passivization: Caldwell et al (1961, p. 219) show that gender system in Dravidian primarily distinguishes between human and nonhuman in contrast with the Indo-European animate and inanimate. Nepali, although an Indo-European language, is perfectly similar to Dravidian in gender system. Passivization is not morphological in Dravidian (Caldwell, Wyatt, & Pillai, pp. 463-467) in contrast with a typical Indo-European language. Pandharipande (1982) has noted morphological passive structure in South Asia to be in the process of decay. This may be an influence of Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman languages over Indo-Aryan and possibly Austric languages.
  21. Phonological nativization of Sankrit pronunciation: Sanskrit universities in South Asia do not teach phonetics although the modern word synonymous for education (शिक्षा) meant phonetics in the Vedic literature. The repercussions of such a convention are such that today every South Asian pundit speaks ‘correct’ Sanskrit using the phonemic inventory of her/his mother tongue. This practice has brought problem of unanimity in correct spelling in Nepali followed by several other mother tongues in Nepal.
  22. Effect of bilingualism on phonemic inventory: I have developed orthography in almost 50% of the unwritten languages of Nepal. My experience with the interactions of the Tibeto-Burman mother tongue speakers gives the evidence that bilingualism and language shift have acted to bring gradual phonological convergence among Nepalese languages.
  23. Role and issues with scripts: Although there are about seven traditional scripts (Devanagari, Ranjana, Kaithi, Mithilaksar, Lepcha, Sirijanga and Tibetan) to write Nepalese languages, Devanagari has served as the basic role model and gradually other scripts like Ranjana and Sirijanga have evolved to be functionally similar to Devanagari although the phonology of the languages show inadequacy and discrepansies.
  24. Popularity and opposition of Devanagari: Political opposition of Nepali has its echo in the opposition of Devanagari also in some of the newly written languages like Umbule Rai, Tamang, Gurung, Magar and Dungmali although majority of those who can read and write cannot read scripts other than Devanagari. Devanagari is common in the Newar language which has not less than seven different traditional scripts. Introducing phonemic writing system in some of these languages is sometimes difficult, because people plead correct forms of spelling on the ground of their prejudice borne through Nepali.
  25. High regards of non-phonemic Devanagari letters: High regards for non-phonemic letters and keeping Devanagari as a model of the phonemic inventory form the graphological influence of Sanskrit over the newly developing orthographies of Nepalese languages. Sanskrit borrowings in Nepalese languages have a tendency to maintain their original spelling (e.g. length in high vowels) even though the letters do not represent any phonemic values.  Apical and laminal contrast in stops and affricates is represented as dental and retroflex contrast; tonal contrast is represented as four way contrast in stops and affricates in orthography and the inventories of sounds in non-Aryan languages are gradually becoming similar to that of Nepali.

 

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