A Salvage Linguistic Anthropological Study of the Endangered Māṅgtā Language of West Bengal, India

Abstract

The present paper is a salvage Linguistic Anthropology, in which attempt has been made to document a nearly-extinct language known as māṅgtā bhāsā, and to suggest appropriate measures for saving it from complete extinction. The word māṅgtā is said to have been derived from māṅā, which means ‘to ask for’ or ‘to beg’. The language is spoken by a few groups of the Bedia, which is a Scheduled Tribe (ST) in India with a population of 88,772 as per Census of India, 2011(Risley [1891]1981; Bandyopadhyay 2012, 2016, 2017). Bedia is a generic name for a number of vagrant gypsy like groups which Risley has divided into seven types. They live by a number of professions such as snake-charming, selling of medicinal herbs, showing chameleon art or multi-forming. Almost all of them have become speakers of more than one language for interacting with speakers of different languages in the neighbourhood for the sake of their survival. Even the present generation has almost forgotten their native speech, and their unawareness of the language becoming extinct is of concern to us. Elders still remember it and use it sometimes in conversations with the fellow members of their community. The ability to speak this language is construed with regard to the origin of this particular group of Bedia. In fact, the language had given them the identity of a separate tribal community while they demanded the status of ST in the recent past. Thus, socio-historically, the māṅgtā language has a special significance. In spite of being a distinct speech, there has been almost no study conducted on this language. This is one of the major motives for taking up the present endeavour. This project conducts morphological, phonological, syntactical and semantic studies on the māṅgtā language. Sociolinguistic aspects of this language have also been considered. The language has its roots in the Indo-European language family with affinity to the Austro-Asiatic family. The paper interrogates whether māṅgtā can be called language or speech. The study required ethnographic field work, audio-visual archiving, and revitalization, along with sustainable livelihood protection of speakers of the language.