Vanishing voices: Only 4 people speak ‘Kui’ in Bangladesh

A language is quietly but surely becoming extinct in some villages at the tea estates of Moulvibazar, Habiganj, and Sylhet, along the Bangladesh-India border.

There resides the Kandha community. Their mother tongue "Kui", also known as Kandh, Khond, Khondo, and Kuinga, is on the verge of extinction.

Kui is a south-central Dravidian language. Scripted in Odia, the language is predominantly spoken in Odisha, and parts of the neighbouring Jharkhand in India.

But in Bangladesh, the language whispers its last stories on the lips of just four elderly individuals of the community. Others, mostly speak Jangli -- a combination of Bangla and Odia languages.

Besides, there are no written scripts in Kui, meaning the language may die with the remaining four people who can speak it.

The Kandha people arrived in these lands during the British era as tea garden workers. They settled, built lives, and their voices intertwined with the local Bangla and Odia, giving birth to the unique "Jangli" language. This became the dominant tongue, while Kui retreated further into the shadows.

A 2016 survey identified 539 Kandha households in 30 tea estates across Sylhet division.

Shyamoli Kandha, a 65-year-old resident of Kalighat Tea Garden in Sreemangal, is one of the last four speakers of Kui.

"I speak in this language only when I meet my elder brother. Sometimes, I wish to return to Jharkhand and speak my language freely," said Shyamoli.

Pankaj Kandha, 48, Shyamoli's nephew and also vice-president of Bangladesh Tea Workers' Union, said, "The Kandha people are suffering from an identity crisis. Only three, including my uncle and aunt, speak Kui. Even I cannot speak my mother tongue barring a few words which I have picked from my grandfather before he died."

"My grandmother used to narrate Kandha myths, riddles, rhymes, monologues, harvest stories, festivals, hunts and traditions in Kui. However, the main problem is, we don't live together like a community. You will only find a couple of Kandha families in each tea estate. So they speak the dominant language to blend in with their colleagues and neighbours," he added.

Summer Institute of Linguistics, an international organisation working with indigenous languages, recently conducted a survey on the Kandha community and Kui as a part of their study on 20 endangered languages in the world.

According to SIL, 76 percent of Kandha community members in Moulvibazar mentioned Odia as their mother tongue with 11 percent saying it to be Kui. However, only 42 percent use Odia while less than one percent use Kui to communicate.

An accepted approach for assessing the status of languages around the world is the "Fishman Criteria", or Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale. The scale has eight levels, with the language considered endangered if it goes above level four. Kui's current status is specified above level six, said Cornelius Tudu, country director of SIL International Bangladesh.

Porimol Baraik, a researcher, said, "According to Article 30 of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which Bangladesh is a signatory, individuals should not be deprived of the right to use language with other members of their community."

Bangladesh's International Mother Language Institute Act-2010 also stresses on preservation of languages and introduction of written forms of all the languages ​​of the indigenous groups, he added.