Stephen Morey with his wife

Dibrugarh, April 12: It was a visitor from faraway England who had learnt about tea from the Singpho tribe and introduced the beverage to the world. Centuries later, an Australian linguist has arrived in Singpho country — in the interior areas of Margherita subdivision of Assam’s Tinsukia district — for documenting the tribe’s language, identified as one of the endangered tongues of the world.

Linguist Stephen Morey disclosed that the Singpho language has become an endangered one primarily because of the tribe’s small population.

Morey is conducting the study under the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme run by a London-based non-governmental organisation that works with La Trobe University in research programmes.

Morey is associated with La Trobe University in Australia.

The Singpho National Council — the highest decision-making body of the tribe in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh — sought help from the global community in preserving its language and culture after realising that the tribe’s population was not increasing on a par with global trends.

Of the 56,000-odd Singphos living across the globe — mainly in China’s Yunan province, Myanmar, some Southeast Asian countries — only around 5,000 are in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.

Assisted by Palash Nath, a research scholar from Gauhati University, Stephan Morey and his wife last week travelled extensively in the Singpho-inhabited areas, collecting material for his research.

Morey was also scheduled to visit some contiguous areas in adjoining Arunachal Pradesh, but could not do so since he was denied permission on security grounds.

Morey pointed out that the language of the Singphos — who are Buddhists — was facing a cultural onslaught.

“The study has revealed many things which we are quite fascinating and at the same time worth preserving. I hope to come back again and carry out the same work once again to unearth more data,” Morey said, before leaving for Australia.

“As far as our research is concerned, I feel that we will be able to put up everything on a website by August this year. And then, it will be the easiest thing for anyone to click and access all the information on the Internet,” Morey added.

The materials collected by Morey and his team includes several old folktales and folksongs of the Singpho community, which had been scientifically recorded during their extensive research.

Rajib Ningkee, a local Singpho youth who guided the team during its study, said it was very nice that an Australian researcher was conducting such an extensive and scientific study of the Singpho language.

“After several demands were raised by people from the tribe, the language had been accorded some recognition in some of the Singpho-inhabited areas in Arunachal Pradesh. There it is being taught as an optional subject in primary schools now. But there should be more efforts to save the language from becoming extinct. Hence, the efforts undertaken by Morey are really encouraging for the community,” Ningkee said.