This Man Creates History by Introducing a Whole New Script for Arunachal Tribe

Wancho is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the eastern part of Arunachal Pradesh, and parts of Assam, Nagaland, and Myanmar. It uses the Roman script, but variation in pronunciations would lead to a change in meaning which bothered Banwang Losu. Banwang Losu was only seventeen years old when he was trying to translate a project on the socio-economic life of his tribe to Wancho. He encountered innumerable problems and strongly felt the need for an independent language which prompted him to create a script of new alphabets for his tribal language. Two Decade Long Journey Losu belongs to the Wancho tribe that resides in the Patkai hills of Arunachal Pradesh’s Longding district. He took up the arduous task of developing a script for Wancho - a tribal language that has 55,000 speakers in Longding district alone — from scratch. After his graduation in 2001, Losu began to collect all sounds in Wancho with the help of the knowledge that he had of the language as well as discussion with village elders. It took him many years of painstaking research to prepare a list of letters that he printed on an A4 size paper and showed his friends. The Wancho Cultural Society and Wancho Students’ Union were very impressed by his work and took up the project which further gained momentum. Hard Work Pays Off Losu published a book on the Wancho script in 2013 which was one of a kind. Today, the Wancho script has 44 letters: 15 vowels and 29 consonants. Many government schools in Arunachal Pradesh are now teaching it as a subject. The icing on the cake happened last week when the Wancho language was published in the international Unicode standard. This basically means that the script now has a digital identity and can be used to type on computers world over. Losu’s journey finally bore fruit and he was ecstatic as his lifelong dream was fulfilled. Image Courtesy: Atlas of Endangered Alphabets