Kusunda - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Bimal Gautam “Nepal's mystery language on the verge of extinction” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17537845

ネパールのKusunda Languageの最後の流暢な話者Gyani Maiya Senさん（75歳）の話。

She is the only person still alive in Nepal who fluently speaks the Kusunda language. The unknown origins and mysterious sentence structures of Kusunda have long baffled linguists.
As such, she has become a star attraction for campaigners eager to preserve her dying tongue.

"Although there are still other people from the Kusunda tribe still alive, they neither understand nor speak the language.
"Other Kusunda people... can only speak a few Kusunda words, but can't communicate [fully] in the language."
Ms Sen fears that when she dies, there will be no one to speak the Kusunda language after her death.
"The Kusunda language will die with me," she reflects, while lamenting the failure of the government and academics to help transfer the language to the next generation.

Although no detailed figures are available, the Central Bureau of Statistics says that only about 100 Kusunda tribespeople remain - but only Ms Sen can speak the language fluently.
That is why she has to converse with them and other people in the Nepali language if she wants to make herself understood.

The Kusunda tribe to which Ms Sen belongs is nomadic. As hunters and gatherers, they live in huts in the jungle and carry bows and arrows to hunt wild animals.
While the males of the tribe hunt, women and children stay at home and search for wild fruits.
The Kusunda - a short and sturdy people - refer to themselves by the word "myak" in their language. They kill monitor lizards ("pui") and wild fowls ("tap").
Linguists and tribal campaigners are now demanding that the government introduce specific programmes to uplift the Kusunda tribe and protect their language.
But no such policy is on the cards, at least in immediate future.
"We do not have any specific programme to preserve this language," admitted Narayan Regmi, spokesperson of the Ministry of Culture.
The National Ethnographic Museum had meanwhile conducted a study on 10 different Nepalese ethnic groups including the Kusunda.
Its research has reached a grim conclusion. The entire Kusunda tribe is on the verge of disappearing along with its last fluent speaker in Nepal.

Kusundaというのはネパール語で「野蛮人（savage）」を意味するので、厳密に言えば〈政治的に正しくない〉呼称ではある*1。
See also

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusunda_language
Ethnologueのエントリー
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=kgg
“Kusunda Genetic Prehistory” http://www.himalayanlanguages.org/kusunda_genetic_prehistory
また、

Paul Whitehouse, Timothy Usher, Merritt Ruhlen, and William S.-Y. Wang “Kusunda: An Indo-Pacific language in Nepal” PNAS 101-15, 2004, pp.5692-5695
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/15/5692.full

という論文では、Kusundaは「印度太平洋語族」に属するとしている。しかしこの説はあまり受け入れられていないんだな。上のBBCの記事もEthnologueもlanguage isolateとしている。Abstractに曰く、

The Kusunda people of central Nepal have long been regarded as a relic tribe of South Asia. They are, or were until recently, seminomadic hunter-gatherers, living in jungles and forests, with a language that shows no similarities to surrounding languages. They are often described as shorter and darker than neighboring tribes. Our research indicates that the Kusunda language is a member of the Indo-Pacific family. This is a surprising finding inasmuch as the Indo-Pacific family is located on New Guinea and surrounding islands. The possibility that Kusunda is a remnant of the migration that led to the initial peopling of New Guinea and Australia warrants additional investigation from both a linguistic and genetic perspective.

*1:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusunda