Tangams: A little-known community of Arunachal Pradesh

Context: Recently, Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu had released a book titled Tangams: An Ethnolinguistic Study of the Critically Endangered Group of Arunachal Pradesh.  
Who are the Tangams?

• The Tangams is a little-known community within the larger Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh and resides in the hamlet of Kugging in Upper Siang district’s Paindem circle.
• In 1975, the community’s population was pegged at 2,000 spread across 25 villages.
• From 2016 to 2020, a team from the Centre for Endangered Languages (CFEL) of Rajiv Gandhi University (RGU), carried out extensive field research and documented the community.
• Their survey revealed that Tangams were now concentrated in only one village (Kugging), with only 253 reported speakers.
• As per the UNESCO World Atlas of Endangered Languages (2009), Tangam — an oral language that belongs to the Tani group, under the greater Tibeto-Burman language family — is marked ‘critically endangered’.

Why are there only a few speakers?

• Kugging is surrounded by a number of villages inhabited by Adi subgroups such as Shimong, Minyongs, as well as the Buddhist tribal community of Khambas, among others.
• To communicate with their neighbours over the years, the Tangams have become multilingual, speaking not just Tangam, but other tongues such as Shimong, Khamba and Hindi.
• They rarely speak their own language now since their population is restricted to a single village. Moreover, the Tangams are relatively unknown — even within their state.
• The village lacks proper infrastructure in all basic sectors of education, health, drinking water facilities, road and electricity. Roads have reached Kugging only in 2018.
• Not a single person from the community has gone to university.

Languages of Arunachal Pradesh

• Till now there has been no systematic, scientific or official survey on the number of languages in Arunachal Pradesh.
• An official linguistic survey by the state government began only in 2018, which is currently underway.
• Before that, People’s Linguistic Survey of India was published in 2017.
• According to experts, there are around 32-34 languages with a disclaimer that it is not a conclusive figure.
• If various linguistic varieties or dialects embedded within these languages are enlisted then the numbers can go up to 90.
• The languages of Arunachal Pradesh have been classified under the Sino-Tibetan language family and more specifically under the Tibeto-Burman and Tai group of languages, such as Lolo-Burmish, Bodhic, Sal, Tani, Mishmi, Hruissh and Tai.
• The education system introduced Devanagari, Assamese and Roman scripts for most tribal languages but new scripts such as Tani Lipi and Wancho Script have been developed by native scholars as well.
• According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, more than 26 languages of Arunachal Pradesh have been identified as endangered with the degrees ranging from ‘unsafe’, ‘definitely endangered’ to ‘critically endangered’.

Risks to their languages

• The diversity of languages has led various communities to depend on English, Assamese and Arunachalee Hindi as the link languages.
• The younger generation of various tribes, especially in the urban areas, has mostly discarded the use of their mother tongue.

Road Ahead

• The diversity of languages has led various communities to depend on English, the Assamese, and the colloquial variety of Hindi called Arunachalee Hindi as the link languages. Many believe this shift has led to the loss of native languages of tribal communities. 
• The book attempts to cover “every aspect of Tangam life and culture that will help the future children retain their unique identity as an ethnolinguistic group.