Mingkeng Lego is crouched over a laptop, a pen in hand and a scattering of books and diaries by his side. The spines of hardbacks and paperbacks are worn, the pages littered with annotations. The hills outside the room are visible through the window – his room is nestled in the lush expanses of Roing in Arunachal Pradesh. The 21-year-old is poring over each volume, carefully translating to English the words from Tani – a family of dialects that shares its name with an umbrella term for the state’s five major tribes.
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Lego and 33 others, as members of the Tani Language Foundation (TLF), are working overtime and against a raft of challenges to keep the centuries-old languages from flickering away.
The foundation started off as a clutch of eager college students on a private WhatsApp group in early 2024. Since then, it has evolved into a larger collective, with clearly a defined goal — keeping Tani languages from dying out.
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“Our efforts include reviving the old unified Tani language, developing a script and crafting lessons to make learning accessible. We want to ensure this beautiful language continues to thrive,” says Takar Milli, an executive member of TLF.
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Around 631,000 Tani people speak a number of Tani dialects, including Nyishi, Mising and Galo.
For years now, Arunachal Pradesh has pushed for deeper connectivity, integration and assimilation with the rest of the country. With higher education options and jobs limited, people of India’s northeastern-most state, which shares a large border with China, have looked beyond the province. But while this is welcome, a fallout of greater globalisation and integration is that they have gnawed away at Arunachal Pradesh’s local languages, most of which are largely understudied, experts said.
That Arunachal has no widely spoken native language complicates this cultural shift, and TLF is determined to halt this linguistic slump.
For Pakbi Lombi, another executive member of TLF, the mission for the group is to unify the Tani communities as much as to preserve their scripts.
“We are committed to fostering cultural exchange and uniting the Tani communities across different states. Our mission is to break the barriers of clanism and bring people together through shared cultural experiences and mutual learning,” he said.
Lego said their efforts were also aimed at bolstering the communities’ cultural identity.
“We collaborate with linguists, educators, and community members to preserve its distinct phonetic features, grammatical structures, and rich vocabulary. Through these efforts, we aim to strengthen cultural identity and foster unity across borders,” said Lego.
The group, comprising several English speakers, has zeroed in on a combination of digital tools, creative engagements and grassroots efforts to keep the languages, spoken primarily in East Kameng, Kurung Kumey West Siang, Lower Siang regions, alive.
One of TLF’s flagship strategies is dubbing cartoons and anime, a Japanese animation form, into Tani languages.
“We have noticed that anime and cartoons serve as powerful tools for engaging youth in learning local dialects by blending entertainment with language exposure. Through relatable characters, immersive storytelling, and cultural references, these animated mediums make language learning fun and natural, encouraging young viewers to pick up new words and phrases effortlessly,” said Lego.
For now, they have chosen cartoons and anime at random to sharpen the process.
“We are in discussions with various creators to develop our own original animations and cartoons. Additionally, we have reached out to the government for support,” said Lego.
The larger Tani family encompasses the Adi, Apatani, Galo, Nyishi, Tagin, and Mising languages, each of which has its own set of diverse dialects and sub-dialects that shift and morph every few kilometres in the hill state. Still, experts underscored that the relatively sparse documentation offers little by way of a broader consensus on the precise counts of the languages that the family incorporates.
One of TLF’s biggest achievements has been the launch of three digital dictionaries in October for the Nyishi, Mising, and Galo dialects. These resources were developed with the North East Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Action (NEIIPA).
“We have dedicated administrators for the Nyishi, Mising, and Galo dialects who regularly update the dictionary,” said Lombi.
Lombi oversees the Galo language, ensuring that he adds at least five or six new words to the dictionary every day.
The Nyishi community is the largest ethnic group in Arunachal Pradesh, with a population of around 300,000, according to the 2011 census. The Galo community has a substantial population as well, estimated to be around 112,272 as of 2011.
A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA in 2017 said 33 languages in the state were “endangered”.
“No single local language is spoken by a sufficiently large percentage of the population to make it acceptable as an official state language,” the 2009 Unesco Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger says about Arunachal Pradesh.
These dialects, experts say, include Tangam, Aka, Miji, Meyor, and Nah. “In Arunachal Pradesh, about two-thirds of the total population of just over 1 million people are mother-tongue speakers of one of approximately thirty endangered languages,” the Unesco Atlassaid. The remaining third, it adds, either spoke Hindi, Bengali or Assamese.
Linguists stress that efforts to document the languages are crucial.
Dr Jamuna Bini, a researcher at Rajiv Gandhi University in Itanagar, says local languages are rapidly fading as younger generations increasingly switch to Hindi, which has emerged as Arunachal’s lingua franca.
“Arunachal has significant linguistic diversity with numerous dialects and sub-dialects. While the state government recognises the importance of local languages and has started implementing initiatives to promote the study of local languages in schools, English remains the only official language till now and Hindi is making constant inroads,” says Dr Bini.