Chepang
A Trans-Himalayan language spoken in Nepal
Chepang
Chepang is an endangered language spoken in Central Nepal. It is classified within the Trans-Himalayan (a.k.a. Tibeto-Burman) language family. Around 48,000 speakers declared speaking the language in 2011, according to the Nepal Central Bureau of Statistics (Nepal CBS). Chepang is mainly spoken in 4 districts of Nepal: Makawanpur, Chitwan, Dhading and Gorkha. The percentage of the population having declared speaking the language is as follows: Makawanpur 83%, Chitwan: 73%, Dhading: 58%, Gorkha: 44%.
A bit of Linguistics!
Chepang is one of the most preserved Trans-Himalayan languages of Nepal. It is an agglutinative and synthetic language. Trans-Himalayan languages are of great typological interest, and in particular with regard to verbal morphology and alignment. Chepang shows a non-canonical direct-inverse system.
To know more about the linguistic structures of Chepang, please feel free to download The Chepang language: Phonology, nominal and verbal morphology - synchrony and diachrony of the varieties of the Lothar and Manahari Rivers.
Our Chepang language corpus keeps growing and currently counts over 33 hours of audio and video recordings:
Literature
Adhikari, Rishiram. 2006. A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Chepang Language of Chitwan District. Masters thesis. Kathmandu: Centre Department of English, Tribhuvan University.
Adhikari, Rishiram & Limbu, Ramesh K. 2013. Shifting linguistic identity of Chepangs. Nepalese Linguistics, 28:1-6.
Adhikari, Rishiram. 2017. Some commonly used words of Chepang. The Saptagandaki Journal, 8:85-92.
Adhikari, Dhruba. 2016. A Concise Dictionary of Chepang Language, Little Flowers Society, Nepal.
Bista, 1957. Chepang, People of Nepal, pp117-128, Ratna Pustak Bhandar, Kathmandu.
Caughley et al. 1969. Notes on Chepang Culture. Journal of the Tribhuvan University Aug. 1969 6/1:77-89.
Caughley, Ross C. 1970. Chepang segmental synopsis. In Hale, Austin and Pike, Kenneth L. (eds.), Tone systems of Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal, 279-99. Urbana: University of Illinois.
Caughley, Ross C. 1971. Chepang as a pronominalised language: technical note. [Manuscript] 10 pp.
Caughley, Ross C. 1982. The Syntax and Morphology of the Verb in Chepang. Canberra: The Australian National University.
Caughley, Ross C. 1999. Bujheli and Chepang: relationship and differences. In Yogendra P. Yadava and Warren W. Glover (eds.), Topics in Nepalese linguistics, 1-25. Kamaladi, Kathmandu, Nepal: Royal Nepal Academy.
Caughley, Ross C. 2002. Ideophones in Chepang: their nature and sub-categorisation. Gipan: TU papers in linguistics, 2 (May): 16-24.
Caughley, Ross C. 2016. Dictionary of Chepang: a Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal. Pacific Linguistics, Canberra.
Pons, Marie-Caroline. 2022. The Chepang language: Phonology, nominal and verbal morphology - synchrony and diachrony of the varieties of the Lothar and Manahari Rivers. Ph.D. Dissertation, Eugene: University of Oregon.
Rutgers, Roland. 1993. The Chepang Verb, a synchronic analysis with some diachronic observations. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia X. 107-138.
Sapkota, Suren & Uranw, Ram K. 2013. A sociolinguistic survey of Chepang. A report submitted to the Linguistic Survey of Nepal(LinSuN), Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal.
