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Part of
Documentary Linguistics: Working with Communities
Edited by Sumittra Suraratdecha and Toshihide Nakayama
[Language Ecology 3:2] 2019
► pp. 209–217
Research Project Report

Attitudes towards Belhare, Nepali and English

A sociolinguistic study of Belhare speech community

| Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu
This paper reports on a sociolinguistic study of the Belhare speech community which is a part of the Belhare language documentation project funded by the Language Commission of the government of Nepal in 2018. This article presents sociolinguistic information on Belhare, a lesser known speech community originally settled in Dhankuta, east Nepal. The main contribution of this paper is to examine domains of language use, language use among generations, attitude towards Belhare, Nepali and English, Belhare speakers as multilingual speakers, languages resources and language proficiency among children.
Keywords: language documentation, language endangerment, hegemony, attitude, sociolinguistic information
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Āthpahariyā: One ethnic group but two languages
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1General domains of language use
    • 3.2Language use among generations
    • 3.3Attitude towards languages
    • 3.4Belhare speakers as multilingual speakers
    • 3.5Language resources
    • 3.6Language proficiency in Belhare, Nepali and English among children
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 9 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/le.00003.rai
References (9)
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