Students fight to keep the dwindling regional languages of Arunachal's tribespeople alive

Minking Lego is crouched over a laptop, a pen in hand and a scattering of books and diaries by his side.

- Damien Lepcha

ITANAGAR: Mingkeng Lego is crouched over a laptop, a pen in hand and a scattering of books and diaries by his side. The spines of hardbacks and paperbacks are worn, the pages littered with annotations. The hills outside the room are visible through the window – his room is nestled in the lush expanses of Roing in Arunachal Pradesh. The 21-year-old is poring over each volume, carefully translating to English the words from Tani – a family of dialects that shares its name with an umbrella term for the state's five major tribes.

Lego and 33 others, as members of the Tani Language Foundation (TLF), are working overtime and against a raft of challenges to keep the centuries-old languages from flickering away.

The foundation started off as a clutch of eager college students on a private WhatsApp group in early 2024. Since then, it has evolved into a larger collective, with clearly a defined goal – keeping Tani languages from dying out.

“Our efforts include reviving the old unified Tani language, developing a script and crafting lessons to make learning accessible. We want to ensure this beautiful language continues to thrive,” says Takar Milli, an executive member of TLF. Around 631,000 Tani people speak a number of Tani dialects, including Nyishi, Mising and Galo.

For years now, Arunachal Pradesh has pushed for deeper connectivity, integration and assimilation with the rest of the country. With higher education options and jobs limited, people of India’s northeasternmost state, which shares a large border with China, have looked beyond the province. But while this is welcome, a fallout of greater globalisation and integration is that they have gnawed away at Arunachal Pradesh’s local languages, most of which are largely understudied, experts said.