Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu has released a book titled Tangams: An Ethnolinguistic Study of The Critically Endangered Group of Arunachal Pradesh. The community has reportedly 253 speakers concentrated in one small hamlet of Arunachal Pradesh.
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Key-Points
The Tangams are a little-known community within the larger Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh and reside in the hamlet of Kugging in Upper Siang district’s Paindem circle.
Earlier, Tangams (1975) community’s population was pegged at 2,000 spread across 25 villages.
As per the UNESCO World Atlas of Endangered Languages (2009), Tangam – an oral language that belongs to the Tani group, under the greater Tibeto-Burman language family – is marked ‘critically endangered’.
Kugging is surrounded by a number of villages inhabited by Adi subgroups such as Shimong, Minyongs, as well as the Buddhist tribal community of Khambas, among others.
To communicate with their neighbours over the years, the Tangams have become multilingual. They rarely speak their own language now since their population is restricted to a single village.
