Mönpa Language of Bhutan | Educational Materials

Editor: Mareike Wulff

About the Collection
This collection contains language learning materials and resources for the endangered Black Mountain Mönpa language from Bhutan. These were created in an effort to support the indigenous Mönpa community in promoting and preserving their until recently exclusively spoken language without writing system.
Black Mountain Mönpa comprises at least a few dialects across several villages. Van Driem (1995) mentions three varieties: 'Olekha and North- and Southeastern. In this project we worked with speakers from the three villages of Jangbi, Phrumzur and Wangling which fall under the North-Eastern variety. According to the 2017 Population and Housing Census of Bhutan around 500 people still speak Black Mountain Mönpa across the three varieties. The population of Jangbi, Wamling and Phrumzur villages consists of around 300 speakers.

Resources
1. The "Tiger and Frog" Story: Traditional Mönpa Storytelling

In this video, Tsetanla tells Phurpala and Mareike a traditional Mönpa folktale. Phurpala interacts with Tsetanla in the Mönpa language and explains the story to Mareike in English.
The recording of the storytelling serves as the basis for an illustrated children’s book, "Tiger and Frog" published by Riyang Books (https://www.riyangbooks.net) in Bhutan. The story in the book is written in Mönpa, with translations into Dzongkha - the national language of Bhutan - and an additional English translation. A QR code in the book directly links to the video in this repository. By watching the film, readers can listen to how Mönpa is spoken and how the language sounds.
Successively, more learning resources, such as an alphabet poster and language posters will be uploaded to the collection.

The Research Project
The educational resources were developed as part of a three years research project (2023-2026) conducted jointly by the linguist Prof. Dr. Gwendolyn Hyslop (The University of Sydney) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0778-7101 and anthropologist Dr. Mareike Wulff (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/The University of Sydney) https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6263-1797.
Hyslop and Wulff both specialise in the Himalayan region with a focus on Bhutanese languages and cultural practices.
The project titled: ‘Documenting Lhokpu and Black Mountain Mönpa languages in Bhutan and their endangered yarn production practices’ is funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (link:https://www.eldp.net) with a ‘Major Documentation Project’.
Wulff documented two endangered minority languages in Bhutan by looking at the communities’ indigenous cultural practices.
The audio and audiovisual recordings, as well as linguistically informed transcriptions, translations and annotations, are archived with ELAR (Endangered Languages Archive, link:https://www.elararchive.org).
The North-Eastern Black Mountain Mönpa collection can be found here: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/f6faebd8-c4df-4b9a-926a-05bba3dcd6f8
The printing of the educational resources - the book and the language posters - is generously funded by Tribal Trust Foundation (https://tribaltrustfoundation.org). Tribal Trust has been been working with the Mönpa community since 2014.

References
Driem, George van. 1995. “Black Mountain Verbal Agreement Morphology, Proto-Tibeto-Burman Morphosyntax and the Linguistic Position of Chinese.” In New Horizons in Tibeto-Burman Morphosyntax, edited by Yoshio Nishi, James A. Matisoff, and Yasuhiko Nagano, 229–59. Senri Ethnological Studies 41. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology.