Chautari Book Series 18
This dictionary has been a long time in the making. I started working on the Thami language, called Thangmi by the people who speak it, in 1996. When I started I knew nothing about the language or the ethnic community of its speakers, and was surprised to discover that few other scholars of Nepal knew much either.
As I got to know Thangmi speakers in the Dolakha and Sindhupalcok districts of central-eastern Nepal, and discovered that the population of this little-known ethnic community was over 20,000, the lack of published work on their language and culture seemed even more surprising. While my research for my PhD dissertation was on the grammar of Thangmi, the Thangmi speakers with whom I was working were naturally more interested in having me publish a dictionary in the Nepali (Devanagari) script. My PhD thesis, they rightly argued, would only be available in English and would be written using complicated linguistic terms and would therefore remain inaccessible to them. A concise dictionary, or more accurately a ‘word list’, in a script which they could read would be of far greater utility to the community. With this request in mind, I have compiled this Nepali-Thami-English Dictionary.
Mark Turin is a linguistic anthropologist who has been working on the Thami language for six years. He received his BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, while his doctoral research was conducted in descriptive linguistics through the Himalayan Languages Project at Leiden University. His is currently Director of the Digital Himalayan Project based at Cambridge and Cornell Universities, and he divides his time between the United Kingdom, the United States and Nepal.
Bir Bahadur 'Lile' Thami is from Dolakha district and has been studying and documenting his mother tongue for over five years. He has written articles in Nepali on Thamai culture, with a particular focus on death rituals.
Mark Turin
Director, Digital Himalaya Project
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF
Great Britain
Email:
thangmi@yahoo.co.uk
