The documentation of Rengmitca: The most endangered language in Bangladesh

Language	Rengmitca
Depositor	Afsana Ferdous Asha, Dr Nathan W. Hill, Mr Singra Mro
Affiliation	Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin
Location	Bangladesh
Collection ID	0816
Project ID	IGS1034
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/0b978060-2ace-45a8-9678-6f3c3f9d31bc

 

Summary of the collection

The deposit is a collection of audio and video recordings of Rengmitca, the endangered most language in Bangladesh. The Rengmitca language is nearly extinct, with only seven fluent speakers. It belongs to the South-Central Tibeto-Burman (Kuki-Chin) language group and is spoken in the vicinity of Alikadam village of Bandarban, in the Southern Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.

 

Group represented

Rengmitca speakers reside in Krangsi Para, northeast of Alikadam, a substate of Bandarban district. They are surrounded by the Mro community, with whom they share living and cultural spaces. The Rengmitca speakers are primarily poor farmers, and their numbers have drastically declined in recent years. In 2013, there were thirty-six living speakers of this language, but by 2024, that number has dwindled to a mere seven. During the monsoon season, the only way to reach the remote residences of five of the Rengmitca speakers is to walk ten to fifteen kilometres from Alikadam, or travel by boat. Now, the Rengmitca speakers want to preserve their language and they wish to continue this educational journey. The initiative has actively involved children, teenagers, and adults within the Mro and Rengmitca community since December 2023.

 

Language information

Khagrachari, Rangamati, and Bandarban, located in the Chittagong division, are home to various indigenous communities in southeastern Bangladesh, particularly these three districts are known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). 41 languages are spoken across Bangladesh. Of them, 14 are recognised as endangered and are disappearing, and Rengmitcha is one. The Rengmitca are one of the most marginalized ethnic communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region. They live with the Mro communities. Despite their distinct identity, little is known about them. Today, only seven individuals, all over forty years of age, are capable of speaking the language, and with their passing, Rengmitca will be at risk of disappearing entirely. It is known as the most endangered Kuki-Chin language of Bangladesh and it belongs to the southern subgroup of Kuki-Chin language-family, and that it is closely related to the Khumi-cluster. There is significant lexical borrowing from Mru, and Rengmitca morphosyntax easily incorporates Mru terms. Following the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS), the Rengmitca language is marked as nearly extinct (8b) and the UNESCO endangerment scale marks it as ‘Critically Endangered’.

 

Collection contents

This deposit is a collection of genres including narrative text, natural conversations, basic sentences and the Swadesh wordlist in Rengmitca. These raw data is uploaded here in audio and video format.

Forthcoming in this collection will be audio and video recordings of both natural speech and elicited materials. These recordings will capture narratives, conversations, traditional songs, and descriptions of cultural practices. In addition, the collection will feature metadata, photographs documenting the fieldwork setting and community life, and, in time, annotated and translated texts prepared using ELAN and FLEx.

 

Special characteristics

This collection represents the first-ever documentation effort of the Rengmitca language, which is critically endangered and currently spoken by only seven fluent speakers. It also serves as the foundation for the first descriptive grammar of Rengmitca. The collection captures not only linguistic data but also valuable cultural knowledge, traditional practices, and oral histories that have never been recorded before. These unique materials are essential for both academic research and future language revitalization initiatives within the community.

 

Collection history

These are raw data, I have initiated the ELAN transcription with few files and also set up and FLEx database which will be added here. Moreover, along with the time being I will continuously transcribe in ELAN.

Forthcoming material here will be collected in 2025-2028 under a project funded by ELDP. It builds upon earlier work, including a collection of genres including narrative text, natural conversations, basic sentences, and the Swadesh wordlist in Rengmitca. These raw data are uploaded here in audio and video formats.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

I acknowledge the speakers of the Rengmitca community.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Ferdous Asha, Afsana, and Singra Mro. 2024. The documentation of Rengmitca: The most endangered language in Bangladesh. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/12e4feb4-06c4-4576-a5ef-16269b10153b. Accessed on [insert date here].