Chhitkul-Rākchham Language Resource

Part of CoRSAL

About the Language

Chhitkul-Rākchham (ISO 639-3 cik) belongs to the West-Himalayish subgroup of Tibeto-Burman languages. The small speaker community (1,000-1,500) inhabits two remote villages, Chhitkul and Rākchham, located in the Kinnaur District of Himachal Pradesh, in Northern India. Ethnographic data reveals a strong connection between high-caste members and Uttarakhand (the Garhwal region) and Uttar Pradesh. Lower-caste people speak an Indo-Aryan variety (West-Pahari?) referred to as Amro bolī (‘our language’), reportedly found throughout Kinnaur. Chhitkul-Rākchham is under severe strain owing to the spread of Hindi. Intergenerational transmission is disrupted and the language is not taught at school. Available data on the language include Bailey (1920), Sharma (1992) and Martinez (2021).

About the collection

This collection consists of 73 recordings, amounting to about 8 hours, from an array of discourse genres: ‘monologues’, everyday conversations, picture-based tasks (Jackal and the Crow and The Family Story), autobiographical and historical narratives, procedural (traditional knowledge, festivals, ritualistic life). The corpus features 56 different speakers (44 men and 12 women) between the ages of 20-85. The choice of video was motivated by the necessity to provide rich contextual data. The use of video does justice to the sheer beauty of the surroundings – the far-off mountains of Kinnaur. This collection is a living proof that Chhitkul-Rākchham is distinct from the local lingua franca, Kinnauri, of which it is often said to be a dialect.

A significant part of the collection has been transcribed and translated into English and Hindi (the official language of HP, together with Sanskrit). More than half of the corpus – all the ‘monologues’, all ten Jackal and the Crow recordings, and a few conversations – is glossed. The recordings and their respective ELAN files are accompanied by ‘thick’ metadata (personal information on the 56 speakers – full name, age, gender, occupation, caste, khandan (clan), level of education, language skills, etc.). Beyond attending to diversity in terms of discourse genres, number of speakers, and targeted languages (English and Hindi), the ELAN files display an additional tier that provides information on borrowings from Hindi, Kinnauri and Tibetan, toponymy, and some comments of ethnographic nature.

This collection goes beyond a compilation of raw linguistic data, anchoring the language and community members in their surroundings, addressing the hitherto lack of knowledge about a peculiar community in many respects: paucity of historical records, geographical remoteness, religious ecology, etc. One of the recordings features a community member who performed the ritualistic function of Oracle for sixty years in Chhitkul village, where Mata Devī is the most prominent deity. A recording on Māng festival provides a unique insight on the syncretism Hinduism-Buddhism-pre-Buddhist beliefs (roaming spirits).

The corpus is multipurpose and dynamic. From a pedagogical point of view, the translation into Hindi fosters future research or documentation work undertaken by local scholars and lays the groundwork for the creation of teaching materials. The corpus may also serve as support to train students wherever language documentation is taught: the collection is easy to navigate, the structured interlinear text and annotation is transparent, and the relevant metadata allows for the incorporation of social variables into a research topic. The collection indirectly showcases the community beyond the immediate interests of language documentation: https://www.sharedsacred.com/philippe-antoine-martinez.html

Corpus building was supported by a grant (SG0531) from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP).

I am deeply indebted to my main consultant, Dhian Singh Negi, for the long hours spent on transcription and translation, and to Nav Prakash Negi for his relentless efforts when accompanying me in both villages.

The cover photo for the collection is named ‘View from the rocks – Rākchham village’ (27-5-2019): rāk means ‘stone’ and tʃʰam ‘bridge’.