Assam Project Puts Three Endangered Tai Languages Online as Khamyang Nears Extinction

Overview

• The All Assam Students’ Union and the Nand Talukdar Foundation released a public archive for Khamyang, Tai Phake and Singpho under the Endangered Language Programme on assamarchive.org.
• Project records identify octogenarian Bhogeswar Thomung of Powaimukh in Tinsukia as the only person fully proficient in Khamyang.
• The corpus includes 12 Khamyang manuscripts with 650 pages and about 540 recorded words and phrases, 262 Tai Phake manuscripts spanning 19,950 pages with recordings of over 675 core lexical units, and a Singpho collection built from printed books with more than 350 recorded speech units.
• All materials are open-access, with thousands of curated photographs and audio designed for learning, research and community use.
• Organisers plan further preservation-plus-revival work and similar digitisation for other vulnerable languages, with leadership by Mrinal Talukdar and linguistic guidance from Dr. Palash Kumar Nath.