A comprehensive documentation and description of Champang: an endangered Tangsa Naga Language

 

Language	Champang
Depositor	Asifa Begum
Affiliation	Department of Linguistics, Gauhati University
Location	India
Collection ID	0757
Grant ID	IGS1003
Funding Body	EDLP
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/26e83e9e-2f6d-4bb1-af38-b9b7f9f4594d

 

Summary of the collection

This collection contains documentation of the Champang language, an endangered Tangsa language, spoken in a couple of villages in the Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India. The project started as a Ph.D. research work and the field visits commenced from January, 2022. Initially, it was a self-financed project, however, in 2024, this project received the prestigious ELDP IGS grant. The current collection includes a sizeable corpus of audio and video recordings of Champang life and activities, conversations, flora & fauna, etc. in addition to recordings of Champang wordlists and elicited sentences. This collection is a work in progress, as it is still being modified and getting expanded.

 

Group represented

The group represented in this collection is Champang, a Tangsa language of the Tibeto-Burman family, spoken in the Indo-Myanmar border regions of the states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh in the Northeastern parts of India. Champang belongs specifically to the Konyak group under the larger subgrouping of ‘Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw’ of the Tibeto-Burman language family (Burling, 2003). Champang traces its origin back to Burma, now Myanmar, who migrated and settled in the high mountain terrains of the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border regions in India.

 

Language information

Champang is one of the many Tangsa-Naga language varieties which are spoken mostly in
Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border areas in India and in Myanmar. It is a Tibeto-Burman language that belongs to the larger subgroup of ‘Sal’ languages (Burling, 1983), a term which was later refined to ‘Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw’. Under this larger umbrella, Burling further claims that Tangsa falls more specifically in the Konyak group, which is mostly known for being “sufficiently heterogenous” to such an extent that “some so-called ‘dialects’ lack mutual intelligibility”(Burling, 2003).
The Konyak languages are also referred to as ‘Northern Naga’ (Voegelin & Voegelin, 1977)
and Tangsa is listed as one of them. Each of the languages within the ‘Northern Naga’ group has been named by the ISO, following Ethnologue, with the element Naga as the first part of the name (Morey, 2017). In India, they are called Tangsa Naga, whereas in Myanmar, the term Tangshang Naga is used.

 

Collection contents

In the current collection, a corpus of about 20 hours of audio recordings are available. These include Champang wordlists, few elicited sentences and some natural texts.

 

Collection history

Prior to receiving the ELDP IGS grant, I started visiting the field and collecting data since January, 2022. I visited the field thrice, and have recorded approximately 32 hours of audio files, which include the complete NILDA (North East Indian Linguistics Documentation Award) wordlist, elicited sentences and naturalistic speech materials. I have started archiving with ELAR from 2023, however, so far I have deposited only unsegmented audio files of about 20 hours in the archive. I’m still in the process of depositing the collected materials into ELAR. I have not archived the materials in any other archiving platforms, except ELAR. The ELDP funded project will start from August, 2024, and all the recorded materials, which will be collected from then on, will go into the same ELAR collection handle set up in 2023 for archiving the Champang corpus.

 

References

Begum, A. (2022). Preliminary Impressions on Champang Language: A Field Report with a few Grammar Notes. Himalayan Linguistics (LPEHR), 21(2), 218-246. doi:10.5070/H921258128

Begum, A. (2023). Champang Phonology. Aligarh Journal of Linguistics, 13.

Burling, R. (1983). The Sal Languages. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 1-31.

Burling, R. (2003). The Tibeto-Burman Languages of Northeastern India. In G. Thurgood, & R. LaPolla (Eds.), The Sino-Tibetan Languages (pp. 169-191). London: Curzon Press.

Morey, S. (2011). Champang Dictionary. (S. Morey, Compiler) Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/islandora/search/Champang?type=dismax

Morey, S. (2017). Tangsa. (G. Thurgood, & R. LaPolla, Eds.) The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 2nd Edition, 350 – 368.

Voegelin, C. F., & Voeglin, F. M. (1977). Classification and index of the world’s languages. New York: Elsevier.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

I express my heartfelt gratitude to ELDP for putting their trust on to this project to document this endangered Tangsa Naga language, Champang, and offering the prestigious IGS grant to this project. I also thank ELAR for providing this digital platform to archive the collected materials for preservation and access by interested users.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:

Begum, Asifa. 2023. A comprehensive documentation and description of Champang: an endangered Tangsa Naga Language. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/32147937-43b6-45cc-9908-2ebb45b372e3. Accessed on [insert date here].