Nepali Language, Identity, and Intergenerational Transmission

𝕴𝖓𝖛𝖎𝖙𝖊𝖉 𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖇𝖚𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓

Jogen Gazmere
Adelaide, Australia

When I was growing up decades ago in Gola Bazar, Sibsoo, Bhutan, Nepali was the predominant language spoken across southern Bhutan and served as the region’s lingua franca, although minor dialects remained prevalent in small pockets. The Nepali language had an established place in the government-funded education system, where it was taught as a compulsory subject in schools across the south. Dedicated Nepali language teachers were initially recruited from the Darjeeling Hills in India. In later years, teachers were increasingly recruited from within the Nepali Bhutanese community, many of whom had received training in Sanskrit and related studies at institutions, mostly in Benares, India.

Beyond the education system, Nepali also served as a principal language of administrative communication in local government at both the Dungkhag (subdivisional) and Dzongkhag (district) levels across southern Bhutan. In the National Assembly of Bhutan, interpretation and translation services were made available during sessions to facilitate the participation of Nepali-speaking members representing southern Bhutan. Kuensel, then Bhutan’s only newspaper, and the popular magazine Druk Losel, both published in Thimphu, the capital, also appeared in Nepali-language editions alongside their English and Dzongkha editions and circulated nationwide.

Nepali also had a presence in the country’s emerging broadcast media. Thimphu was home to Radio NYAB, currently known as the Bhutan Broadcasting Service. The radio station then operated under the auspices of the National Youth Association of Bhutan (NYAB). It broadcast a popular Nepali-language program every Sunday, primarily targeting Nepali Bhutanese listeners. At the time, there were no Nepali Bhutanese with the requisite broadcasting skills and expertise, and hence program producers and presenters were recruited primarily from Darjeeling and Kalimpong in India. Among them, Ashok Rai emerged as a particularly popular presenter.

Radio NYAB also made efforts to actively promote Nepali songs and music by sending its officials to southern Bhutan from time to time in search of local talent. On one such occasion, Bishnu Sharma and his team from Radio NYAB visited Samchi, Bhutan, and recorded songs performed by local artists, including a group of which I was a member. These recordings were subsequently broadcast by Radio NYAB, providing encouragement and inspiration to local Nepali Bhutanese lyricists, composers, and singers in their creative pursuits.

Familiarity with Nepali, however, was not confined to southern Bhutan. Historically, Nepali was widely understood in Thimphu and many other district headquarters in northwestern and eastern Bhutan. Many local residents in these areas were generally able to communicate in Nepali with appreciable ease, albeit with a distinctive local accent. The language also had a strong presence among Thimphu’s elite, many of whom had received their education at prominent Christian missionary institutions in Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kurseong. Their educational and social connections with these centres of Nepali-speaking culture further contributed to the language’s familiarity and influence within the capital.

This wider cultural presence was also evident in everyday life. During the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of taxi drivers in Thimphu were Nepali-speaking Indians from the Darjeeling Hills and adjoining areas. They played an important role in popularising Nepali humour, particularly the jokes associated with Hamjayega, a legendary taxi driver in Darjeeling renowned for his quick wit and extraordinary knack for creating and delivering original jokes.

I witnessed an instance of this cultural influence firsthand in 1980. After graduating from my local high school in Sibsoo, Bhutan, I went on to study at Yangchenphu Central School in Thimphu, where I lived in the school hostel. One day, I came across a group of Dzongkha-speaking students from northwestern Bhutan who had gathered in one corner of the hostel, animatedly exchanging Hamjayega’s jokes in Nepali and frequently bursting into laughter. I found the scene particularly striking. It offered a glimpse into the extent to which Nepali had permeated the everyday cultural life of some of the young Bhutanese who were not native Nepali speakers. Their ease with the language and evident enjoyment of its humour reflected both their familiarity with Nepali and their receptiveness to its wider cultural influence.

Such cultural permeation and receptivity, however, were not to last long. Nine years on, 6 January 1989 marked a Black Day for the cultural heritage of the Nepali Bhutanese, when the Fourth King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, implemented the “One Nation, One People” policy. The policy not only advanced the dominance of northwestern Bhutan’s Drukpa culture over the country’s other cultural traditions but, more particularly, subjected the cultural and linguistic heritage of the Nepali Bhutanese to systematic and grievous assaults. Consequently, the once much-loved and widely accepted Nepali language and culture in Bhutan were suddenly transformed into objects of official distaste and derision.

Bhutan, as we know it, is a multilingual nation, with around 19 native languages in existence. Three of these languages are spoken by substantial sections of the population: Tshangla in eastern Bhutan, Dzongkha in northwestern Bhutan, and Nepali in southern Bhutan. Through the 1989 “One Nation, One People” policy, the Dzongkha language, backed by active government promotion and extensive investment in its development, had already gained considerable dominance over the country’s other languages. Another royal decree issued by the King in 1993, emphasising the expanded use of Dzongkha in government offices, further strengthened its institutional advantage while effectively relegating Tshangla and Nepali to the national heritage dustbin – two languages that together are spoken by a significant majority, close to 80%, of Bhutan’s population.

In southern Bhutan, the continuing alienation of Nepali Bhutanese cultural heritage is exacting a heavy toll on the younger generation, progressively eroding their proficiency in the Nepali language and weakening their linguistic connection to their cultural heritage. As someone who once fought for the protection and preservation of Nepali Bhutanese cultural heritage in Bhutan, I was deeply pained to learn from my sister-in-law that her nieces and nephews, who have come from Bhutan to pursue their studies in Australia, communicate mostly in Dzongkha among themselves and with their spouses. They revert to Nepali mainly when their elderly family members are around.

This state of affairs has left the Nepali Bhutanese in southern Bhutan in a profound quandary, amid the growing threat of a breakdown in intergenerational language transmission. If young second-generation couples continue to be detached from their native Nepali tongue and are increasingly nudged to adopt Dzongkha as their primary language of communication at home, the consequences for the next generation could be deeply disconcerting, with future generations being altogether denied their right to practise and enjoy the Nepali language and cultural heritage, raising the prospect that such a process may eventually culminate in cultural genocide.

In the diaspora, a comparable pattern continues to unfold, particularly with the growing disconnection of Generation Alpha from the Nepali language. I have personally heard painful accounts from elderly Bhutanese grandparents who find themselves increasingly distanced from their grandchildren and unable to communicate with them because of the language barrier, despite living under the same roof, where the grandparents speak only Nepali, while their grandchildren mostly communicate in English.

Even when the grandchildren have a rudimentary knowledge of Nepali, they are often either hesitant or disinterested in using it. In essence, owing to their peer linguistic and socio-educational environment, English has become their language of first choice, deeply embedded in their linguistic psyche and more readily accessible to them than Nepali. This linguistic predisposition, in turn, acts as a disincentive to the use of their native Nepali tongue.

Taken together, these developments have left the Nepali Bhutanese, both in Bhutan and in the diaspora, confronting an increasingly evident linguocultural predicament. In Bhutan, politically driven government policy measures have overtly contributed to the systematic marginalisation and erosion of the Nepali language, while in the Bhutanese diaspora, it is the broader composite sociocultural setting and the educational environment that increasingly challenge the language’s continuity and intergenerational transmission.

For every community, language has long been the soul of its cultural identity and heritage. It is deeply embedded in its speakers’ cultural psyche, sense of collective belonging, and emotional life. Language not only serves as a medium for day-to-day communication but also as an important means of preserving the values and practices ingrained in cultural traditions and facilitating their transmission across generations. In the late 1980s, the spontaneous struggle was indeed driven by the spirit of these values, as the Nepali Bhutanese rose in resistance against the government’s repression of the Nepali language and other fundamental human rights in southern Bhutan.

At this point, it would be appropriate to turn briefly to a comparable language issue in a neighbouring country to gain a broader perspective and a better understanding of what language means to a community. For many years, I have been following the language movement in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which bears certain parallels to the language issue in southern Bhutan.

In 1937, when the study of Hindi was made compulsory in schools across the Madras Presidency, then still under British rule, mass protests, locally known as Mozhi Por (“Language War”), erupted, leading to the long-term imprisonment of two young protesters who later died in prison. As the protests continued and progressively intensified, the government withdrew the compulsory Hindi policy in early 1940.

The second wave of anti-Hindi agitation commenced in 1964, when the continued use of English as an official language of the Indian Union was set to expire in 1965, with Hindi due to replace it unless Parliament extended the use of English. As the agitation against the impending change intensified, university students and political activists resorted to the drastic act of self-immolation, taking the protest to an extreme level. Gradually, the protests escalated into mass rioting and police firing. According to official figures, around 70 people were reported dead, while unofficial estimates placed the death toll at over 300.

The language issue in Tamil Nadu is so deeply rooted, and its people so emotionally invested in it, that they do not shy away from challenging even the celestial realm when it concerns the Tamil language. I came to appreciate the depth of this sentiment while listening to a BBC radio interview in the late 1990s, when I was living in the Beldangi Extension Bhutanese refugee camp in Jhapa, Nepal. During the interview, a Tamil respondent was asked whether God would listen to a prayer offered in Tamil if Sanskrit alone were regarded as God’s language. His retort was striking: “If God doesn’t understand Tamil, he has no right to stay in Tamil Nadu.”

A similar example, again relating to the Tamil community, can be found in Sri Lanka, where S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s government enacted the Sinhala Only Act in 1956, replacing English with Sinhala as the sole official language. The policy deeply offended Tamil linguistic and cultural sentiments and, alongside other political grievances, contributed to the growth of Tamil nationalism in northern Sri Lanka. As nationalist sentiment grew, many groups were formed to press their demands. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, founded in 1976, later spearheaded an armed separatist struggle that escalated into a full-scale civil war in 1983, with devastating consequences.

Another impact of the Sinhala Only policy is worth noting here. The broader shift towards Sinhala as the medium of education also had consequences for English-language proficiency among the Sinhalese themselves. In 1985, I personally witnessed this while studying at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, where Sinhalese students were required to undertake an English bridging course to improve their proficiency sufficiently to follow lectures and complete academic assignments.

As elucidated above, language issues are delicate and, when not handled sensitively, can develop into wider and more protracted problems. Even in 2026, Tamil Nadu’s resistance to the inclusion of Hindi in its state school curriculum continues to generate passionate debate, including before the Supreme Court of India. Where this debate will ultimately lead is not an easy question to answer.

Now, coming back to the Bhutanese context, the country unfortunately remains caught to this day in a linguistic conundrum, marked by the overt hegemony of the Dzongkha language. Around 16 minor dialects in Bhutan have historically been subjected to neglect, and the risk of their extinction continues to grow by the day. Through his 1989 decree, the Fourth King has already set the Nepali language in southern Bhutan on an imperceptible path towards eventual decay and destruction. The Tshangla language, the lingua franca of eastern Bhutan, faces a similarly bleak and worrisome future.

Although the government of Bhutan considers the Sarchopks to be the earliest immigrants to Bhutan from the Indo-Burman region, the Sarchopks themselves claim to be the true natives of Bhutan, pointing to the absence of any trace of their language and cultural heritage elsewhere in Tibet or the Indo-Burman region. For a native people like the Sarchopks to find their own language being pushed towards disappearance through Dzongkha hegemony is both deeply troubling and condemnable.

Currently, no voice is being openly raised against the government’s prejudice towards regional and minority languages in Bhutan. Some faint voices have already begun to be heard on Bhutanese social media platforms. However, over time, demands for the protection of marginalised languages in Bhutan will inevitably emerge. Once consciousness of the importance of language for cultural preservation and intergenerational transmission fully awakens among the people of the east and south, calls for the reinstatement and protection of their languages will no doubt arise one day.

With regard to the challenges to the continuity and intergenerational transmission of the Nepali language in the Bhutanese diaspora, the problems are multifaceted in nature and demand a holistic and collaborative approach to finding appropriate and effective solutions. Thankfully, many efforts and initiatives are already in place across the diaspora. The voluntary work of language and literature enthusiasts in the diaspora, who have been running Nepali classes locally for their children for years, is commendable and deserves due acknowledgement and kudos. Other individual initiatives aimed at creating online learning resources for children are equally commendable and deserving of praise.

Moving forward, the Bhutanese diaspora needs to introspect on how to progress beyond these localised, isolated and tested initiatives towards a broader-based, participatory and collaborative diaspora-level mission. Such a mission should undertake a long-term collective project for the development, standardisation and dissemination of online Nepali Bhutanese language resources. Of course, for this, the individuals and institutions already working in the field of Nepali Bhutanese language and literature can play central and crucial roles in bringing together all relevant stakeholders from local organisations and groups based in individual countries and uniting them in a collective mission at the diaspora level.

Importantly, our goals and efforts should primarily be focused on Generations Alpha and Beta, as well as their parents, so that, by working together in this mission, we can overcome the prevailing challenges and continue fulfilling our responsibility to keep the Nepali language alive and vibrant in the Bhutanese diaspora while ensuring its continued transmission to younger and future generations.