Lepcha

Lepcha, called Róngríng by its speakers, is the language of the aboriginal inhabitants of Sikkim and the Darjeeling hills, present before Tibetan and Nepali reached the region. It is one of the few Himalayan minority languages with an indigenous writing system: the Róng script, traditionally credited to the seventeenth-century Sikkimese court and originally written in vertical columns, with a substantial manuscript literature behind it. Phonologically it has eight vowels including an unrounded back /ɯ/ and a schwa written with a diacritic called the rân, while syllable-final stops are pre-glottalised and unreleased, so ríp 'flower' is [riʔp̚]. Lepcha is an official language of Sikkim and is taught in state schools, but monolingual speakers had already vanished by the mid-twentieth century, essentially all speakers are bilingual in Nepali, and transmission to children is weakening. Modern vocabulary is very poorly documented — the standing dictionaries are Mainwaring & Grünwedel (1898) and the Lepcha–English Encyclopedic Dictionary, neither of which covers twentieth-century internationalisms.

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