Papers by Prof. Dr. Dan Raj Regmi
Nepalese Linguistics, Vol. 38 (1), 2024
This paper classifies 124 ancestral languages focusing on language maintenance and shift; and she... more This paper classifies 124 ancestral languages focusing on language maintenance and shift; and sheds lights on outcome of enumeration of such languages and its implications to language policy implementation in Nepal. In 2021 census, 47 Indo-Aryan and 72 Sino-Tibetan languages were recorded by 78.3% and 21.4% people as ancestral languages, respectively. Such languages, including major languages, belonging to different family groups and sub-groups, demonstrate pitiable language maintenance. This census highly valued language identity. However, it could not mitigate trend of recording unreliable numbers of mother tongue speakers. Obviously, such results imply that official language policy cannot be executed effectively unless such languages are maintained properly.
Keywords: Language family, language identity, language maintenance, linguistic census, language policy
Journal of Nepalese Studies, Vol. 16, 2024
Mother tongues belonging to different genealogy present an appalling view in terms of vitality an... more Mother tongues belonging to different genealogy present an appalling view in terms of vitality and levels of language use. The 2021 census has identified 124 mother tongues belonging broadly to four major language families, viz., Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic and Dravidian including one language isolate. There are 47 Indo-European mother tongues. They are spoken by 83.07% of the total population. The numbers of Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic mother tongues amount to 72 and three, respectively. They are spoken by 16.59% and 0.19% of the total population, respectively. Dravidian and language isolate each counts single language spoken by less than one percent. The mother tongues broadly belonging to major language families further belong to different sub-groups. Only 16.9% of the total mother tongues are destined to have speakers more than 1,00,000. Of such mother tongues, 13 belong to Indo-European and 8 belong to Sino-Tibetan. Only 47.6% mother tongues are safe. Around 30.6% are vulnerable and 8.9% are shifting. Around 52.4% mother tongues are facing different labels of endangerment. Around 43.46% mother tongues have sustainable levels of language use. The existing anomalies appeared in the counting of the mother tongues may be mitigated by conducting a separate language census and framing a formal language policy.
Gipan, 2024
Lhowa exhibits a large inventory of forty-one consonant phonemes. In terms of points of articulat... more Lhowa exhibits a large inventory of forty-one consonant phonemes. In terms of points of articulation, it contains seven types of consonants, viz., labial, dental, alveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar and glottal. In terms of manner of articulation, it presents seven types of consonants, viz., stops, nasals, affricates, fricatives, trills, laterals and approximants. In terms of voicing, there are two types of consonant phonemes, viz., voiceless and voiced. Lhowa has voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced murmured and voiceless murmured sounds. It exhibits a distinct consonant distribution. Lhowa has eight basic and two fronted vowels. There are four diphthongs. Lhowa displays a moderately complex syllable structure. It presents a canonical structure of the syllable in which V is obligatory and other constituents, (Ci, initial consonant), (X, voiced palatal approximant), and (Cf, final consonant) are optional. Lhowa permits only five types of syllable patterns. Each syllable is intrinsically high or low. It exhibits simple tone system. The high vs. low tone is distinguished only on the first syllable of a word. In Lhowa, like in Lhasa Tibetan, compound words demonstrate four types of tone melodies, viz., HH, LH, LL and HL.
Nepalese Linguistics, 2000
desceco.org
... Choosing orthography for the Bhujel language may be a great issue in the present context ofNe... more ... Choosing orthography for the Bhujel language may be a great issue in the present context ofNepal. ... " Orthography Issues in Tibeto-Burman Languages of Nepal." Paper presented at the 21st annual conference of Linguistic Society of Nepal, Kathamndu, 2000. ...
International Mother Language Day 2019, pp. 113-130, 2019
This paper deals, particularly, with some methods/techniques employed for assessing the community... more This paper deals, particularly, with some methods/techniques employed for assessing the community's desire and need for multilingual education (especially MTB-MLE program) for the early childhood education (i.e., the preschool and primary school children), especially, in the minority speech communities in Nepal. Additionally, it aims at analyzing the relative bearing of the findings of the study based on those methods including some major challenges for the implementation of multilingual education in such communities. Nepal, a small country lying in the lap of the Himalayas, houses more than 125 castes and ethnicities speaking more than 123 mother tongues (CBS, 2012). More than seventy languages may be defined as minority languages. Such languages are characterized by being spoken by a smaller number of speakers (mainly adults) and lacking official status. Each speech community is entitled the right of basic education in its respective mother tongues. However, the children of minority speech communities residing particularly in the hinter parts of the country are deprived of quality basic education. Class repetition, low quality and high drop-out are the major problems in basic education in such Communities. Multilingual education is one of the etfective strategies to address such problems. However, multilingual programs Conducted by the governmental and non-governmental organizations have not been fully goal-oriented. There are a number of challenges Of multilingual education in Nepal (Regmi, 2012). Many multilingual "Prolessor & former Head, Central Department of Linguistics, TU, Nepal Central Department of Linguistics, T.U., Nepal education programs have been conducted without assessing the community's desire and tlhe real nccessity properly. The ent husi asm for multilingual education docs not sustain for : a long time. Besi des. many programs have been launched with the motive of language revitalization or preservation in Nepal. Thus, a proper assessment of the desire and the need, by employing effective strategies, is
Perspectives on Higher Education, 2011, Vol. 6, pp.21-28, 2011
This paper looks at some morphophonological rules in Bhujel within the framework of generative ph... more This paper looks at some morphophonological rules in Bhujel within the framework of generative phonology (Chomsky and Hale, i968). Bhujel, which is an agghutinative Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly in Tanahun, Gorkha, Nawalparasi and Chitwan, exhibits some typologically interesting morphophonological alternations mainly conditioned by two factors: surrounding segments and syllable structure. This paper making use of both elicited and text corpus cross-checked with other native speakers of Bhujel mainly deals with morphophonological processes, namely, assimilation, epenthesis and deletion.
JODEM ( Journal of the Department of English), Vol. 3, pp. 1-8, 2011
This paper attempts to examine the issues and approaches to orthography development for the stand... more This paper attempts to examine the issues and approaches to orthography development for the standardization of Bhujel, a preliterate language. Bhujel, natively referred to as puk'gyal yur. (puk'gyal 'Bhujel' and yur language'), along with Hayu and other Kiranti languages, is one of the east Himalayish languages of Himalayish section of the Bodic branch of Tibeto-Burman language family (Regmi, 2007). Ît is an endangered language spoken by 10,733 (.e. 9.196) of the 1. 17.664 ethnic Bhujel (Gurung et al., 2006) However, this language is actually spoken by an estimated 3,923 of 5418 (i.e.72.4%) ethnic Bhujel, most of them living along the Mahabharata mountain range of Tanahun District of Nepal. Presently, they are also
Nepalese Linguistics Vol. 20, 2003, pp. 103-109, 2003
TU Bulletin Special 2017, pp. 13-24, 2017
Nepalese Linguistics, Vol.17, pp.56-61, 2000
नेपालमा प्रचलित प्रमुख लिपिहरू: स्थिति, समस्या र सम्भावना, २०७४, पृष्ठ १०१-११६ , 2017
Language Endangerment and Language Revitalization in Himalaya ( Proceedings of the International Seminar on Endangered Languages of Himalaya, Almora 2018), pp.131-148, 2020
Nepalese Linguistics, Vol. 19, 2002, pp. 38-47, 2002
Nepalese Linguistics, Vol. 26. pp. 206-217, 2011
भृकिटी, २०६७, पूर्णाङ्क ८, साउन-भदौ-असोज, पृष्ठ १०६-११६, 2000
खाङ्लो, अङ्क १२, वर्ष १७, पृष्ठ २-८, २०७५, 2018
प्रज्ञा ( शोधमूलक अर्धवार्षिक) २०६७, वर्ष ४०, पूर्णाङ्क १०३, पृष्ठ १-१० , 2000
EMBLEM, 2054 BS, pp. 32-35, 1997
This article is basicaly intended for those students, who are prepared specifically to develop th... more This article is basicaly intended for those students, who are prepared specifically to develop the communicative conpetence in translation ftom Nepali into English. The communioative competence here refers to the control over the grammar and structure of both mother tongue and English language and the ability to use them appropriately in real-life situations. In Nepal despite the fact that many attempts have been made to improve teaching and leaming situation of English. the level of the communicative competence of the learners of English is not encouraging. In most cases when they are asked to express in Nepali or their mother tongue, the level of knowledge of the subject matter is undoubtedly considerable, but when they have to express in English, they lack communicative competence. This situation leads us to make some remarks on the present and the past English courses in Nepal. Prior to the New Education System Plan (2028 B.S.) translation was one of the prominent components of English sylabus from primary to university levels. After the introduction of the plan the syllabus of English discarded translation. The Second Convention of T.U.
TU Bulletin Special 2011-12, pp.46-56, 2011
The reports of these population censuses do not visualize the real picture of the present languag... more The reports of these population censuses do not visualize the real picture of the present language situation in Nepal. Many spoken languages especially of indigenous nationalities have not yet been recorded in the 2001 census. Linguists from home and abroad as well as the speech communities are very concerned about the situation of languages of Nepal.
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Papers by Prof. Dr. Dan Raj Regmi
Keywords: Language family, language identity, language maintenance, linguistic census, language policy
Keywords: Language family, language identity, language maintenance, linguistic census, language policy
The case studies made in Western Tamang and Rajbanshii have explored a number of challenges as well as some way-outs for effective implementation of mother-tongue education policy in such communities. First and foremost, the roles of mother tongue, Nepali and English have not yet been fully justified. In most of minority speech communities, there is only sentimental attitude towards their mother tongue. Most of the MLE programmes have been commenced without conducting needs assessment (Regmi, 2019). There is lack of appropriate textbooks and reading materials incorporating local cultures and life crucial knowledge embodied in language. Due to lack of trained and motivated teachers programmes so far implemented are also facing the problem of quality maintenance. Thus, a promising and inclusive multilingual education policy should be developed and implemented for maintaining the sustainability of MLE programmes in minority speech communities in Nepal.
Keywords: multilingual, language vitality, language attitude, basic words, sustainable language use
Till the day, there are some admirable attempts, viz., Watters (2008), Eppele et al.(2012), Yadava (2013), Regmi (2020), Pokharel (2020) and Regmi (2021a &2021b) to present the sociolinguistic typology of the languages of Nepal. However, no attempt has been made to review the situations of languages of from the perspectives of sociolinguistic typology, census of the languages and sustainable language use. The data are based on the Linguistic Survey of Nepal , national censuses and ethnologue of the languages of Nepal. This paper has employed an approach developed in Bell (1976), Vinogradov (1976), Mechkovskaya (2001) and Shoumarov and Iriskulov (2005) to analyze the sociolinguistic typology. Likewise, sustainable use model developed in Lewis and Simons (2010 & 2017) has been employed to discuss sustainable language use of the languages of Nepal.
This paper is broadly organized into six sections. Section 2 presents an overview of present demographic position of the languages of Nepal and socio-linguistic situation of the languages as revealed/exposed by the Linguistic Survey of Nepal. In section 3, we attempt to present a sociolinguistic typology of the languages of Nepal. Section 4 critically assesses census data of the languages and their speakers in Nepal. In section 5, we deal with sustainable language use of the languages of Nepal. Section 6 presents the conclusion of the paper.
This is a field-based study of the form of the Bhujel language spoken mainly in the Andimul village (Anbukhaireni- 1 and Bandipur-8) in Tanahun District. The main goal of the study is to analyze the forms and functions of different grammatical categories of the Bhujel language and compare the structural features of Bhujel revealed by this study to the characteristic structural features of the Tibeto-Burman languages from the typological perspective. This study also examines how the morphosyntactic structure in Bhujel manifests the subtle relationship between linguistic form and linguistic function at both sentence and discourse levels.
The study is organized into thirteen chapters. Chapter 1 mainly reviews the previous descriptive works on the language and sets out the theoretical position underlying the description. It also outlines the objectives, the significance and the limitations of the study. Chapter 2 mainly examines the sociolinguistic aspects such as the domains of the language use, the attitudes of the speakers towards the language, and the language endangerment. It also discusses the ethnology of the Bhujel. Chapter 3 analyzes the segmental and supra-segmental features of the language. Chapter 4 presents the acoustic analysis of the sounds of the language. Chapter 5 examines the morphophonological processes in the language. Chapter 6 proposes the Devanagari script for the preliterate Bhujel language. Chapter 7 looks at the inflectional and derivational morphology of the nouns in Bhujel. It also examines the morphology of the pronouns in the language. Chapter 8 discusses the formation, distribution and functions of the adjectives in the language. Chapter 9 analyzes the categories of the verb such as tense, aspect and modality in the language. It also presents a complex verb agreement system which is based on the hierarchical ranking of the participants (i.e.1→2, 1→3, 2→3) rather than on their semantic or grammatical relations. We argue that Bhujel presents a unique type of the marking on the verb for the direct relations of the participants. Besides, it shows the neutralization of the 'direct' marker and tense markers in the negative construction. Chapter 10 discusses the adverbs in Bhujel. Chapter 11 looks at the clause structure, noun phrase, order of the elements in the verb complex, major sentences and clause combining processes in the language. Chapter 12 deals with the morphosyntactic devices which are used in the domains of topic continuity, action continuity and thematic continuity at the multi-propositional discourse level in Bhujel. Besides, this chapter discusses such strategies which are employed for different types of discourse functions at the atomic propositional level. Chapter 13 presents the summary and typological implications of the study.
The annexes mainly comprise 10 analyzed texts, basic vocabulary, and socio-linguistic questionnaire, the respondents of the socio-linguistic questionnaire, Swadesh 100 wordlist of Bhujel dialects, verb inflection paradigms and Bhujel morphemes, their glossing and description in the language.