THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

People did not seem unduly perturbed about the changes they could
see occurring in the Yakha language, nor the uncertain future it faced.
They did not generally seem to feel that their language was 'dying'.
People tended to have a very pragmatic view of language as a medium of
communication. If it did not perform this function, perhaps it was
better dispensed with. People did not seem to feel that there might be
certain concepts and ideas that it was possible to express only in
Yakha. Even if a word was obviously from Nepali rather than Yakha, as
long as it was presented in the context of Yakha speech, it was still
seen as part of Yakha, not as an intrusion from Nepali. People had
confidence that direct translations of every individual sentence or
phrase were possible from Yakha into Nepali. Similarly the idea that
the phonemes of Yakha might be different and could not be adequately
recorded in Devanagari script seemed incredible to most people.
Language, then, was not the unambiguous marker of Yakha identity
which might at first have been expected, The various languages spoken
under the title ' Yakha' covered a large spectrum possibly intermediate
between Limbu and Rai dialects and shading into them at eitner end,
Nepa 1 i i nf 1 uence on the 1 anguage was strong, and in some places peop 1 e
who were 'Yakha' no longer spoke a language of that name, having adopted
Nepali as a more useful communicative medium than their own language.
It seemed that all adults in Tamaphok spoke Nepali, and while those who
spoke 'Yakha' exhibited obvious affection for it, it was accepted that
one did not have to speak 'Yakha' to be a Yakha. Although it was a
language of very different phonology and syntax, it was widely accepted
that it could be readily translated into Nepali without loss of meaning.
There was thus a complex harmony between Yakha and Nepali, On the one