A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland

So I should probably apologise / apologize for my lack of updates the past year or so. It's been pretty crazy since I started grad school - I'd have to spend many a blog post explaining all the wonderful things I've been able to do since I started in the linguistics PhD programme here at the University of Oregon.

In the meantime, in the 'American' spirit of self-promotion, I thought I should mention that I finally finished revising my University of Melbourne MA thesis A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland and got it published with Asia-Pacific Linguistics in Canberra.

It's an open access ebook (print on demand), and you can download it right here at the ANU digital collections page here.

I have too many people to thank for this, especially my family who've supported me all through this crazy journey, as well as the Sumi community / my Sumi family. I'm so thankful for all the amazing people I've met along the way, and all the help I've received in making this possible. Noshikimithi va na!

Nagaland village focus: Khuzama

As I prepare to leave India again (this time to spend Christmas at home with the family for the first time in years), I thought I'd share some photos from a visit to another friend's village in Nagaland. Like Khonoma village that we also visited, Khuzama is an Angami village. You can tell it's an Angami by the suffix -ma (corresponding to Sumi village names that end in -mi). However, most Angami speakers seem to replace the -ma with -ra / -rie when they refer to the villages in speech.

While Khonoma is a Western Angami village, Khuzama is one of the Southern Angami villages situated on the highway between Kohima and Imphal in Manipur. It's also the last Angami village before you reach the state border with Manipur and the start of Mao territory. The Maos (not to be confused with Maoists) are another related tribe. Linguistically, Southern Angami dialects are so different from Tenyidie (standard Angami based on Northen Angami) that they might constitute a different language altogether. My friend from Khuzama says he finds it easier to understand Chokri (one of the main languages of the group previously classified as 'Eastern Angami' but now known as Chakhesang).

The current Khuzama village gate

The weekend my friend from Australia was around, our Angami friends who usually live in Kohima had a church function to attend in Khuzama. I thought it'd be nice to go for a walk around the terraces and they were happy for us to take us to the village. They got one of the boys in the village to take us around, and also to explain to people why a couple of strangers were walking around their village.

Our 'guide' for the afternoon brought us to our friend's plot of land. Unlike with jhum cultivation, which involves shifting to a new field site every 2 years and the re-allocation of new plots to people to cultivate (typically by the village chief), terraces are 'owned' by the same people every year. They are also passed down from generation to generation, but only to sons I believe.

From the village, we could also see the neighbouring village of Viswema. I'm told it's the largest of the Southern Angami villages. If you've been on the highway from Kohima to Imphal, you would have probably noticed that most of the roofs on the houses have been painted red, making it almost look like some Italian village on a hilltop.

We walked down all the way to the little river / stream. It would've been nice to have a picnic on the rocks in the middle of the stream, but we hadn't organised ourselves that well.

We had a really pleasant afternoon walking around the terraced fields down to the stream. It didn't take us long to get down, but the climb back up was quite strenuous, and we weren't carrying baskets of grain or anything back up to the village with us! We were told that when there's a lot of work to be done in the fields, some villagers do sleep in the field huts that you can see dotting the hillside.


I should add that the Angamis and Chakhesangs (formerly 'Eastern Angamis', as mentioned above) are cited as the only two tribes in Nagaland to have started practising terracing before the arrival of the British. (They do still practise some jhum cultivation to grow other crops.) I've been asking around about the origins of terracing in these tribes, as it strikes me as imported technology, but no one I've asked has been able to give a satisfactory reply. I would be quite interested to find out more about local stories / folktales surrounding its origins in these communities.

Alright, this will probably be my last post in India for a while. I still have a backlog of material to upload, and I'll try to do that when I'm back in Singapore or Australia. In the meantime, Happy Holidays everyone!

Khonoma village (Take two)

Two years ago I visited Khonoma village, which is about 2 hours from Kohima (depending on road conditions). Unfortunately, the day I visited was terribly foggy and it was hard to see anything (see here). This time, I visited again shortly after the Hornbill Festival. Thankfully the weather was much better, since I also came with a friend from Australia who may not have another chance to come back.

Now, there are some friends who don't feel that Khonoma needs any special mention or recommendation. Even among my Angami friends, people from Khonoma are often perceived as being particularly proud, arrogant even. The village itself is famed for its defiance of the British which culminated in the Battle of Khonoma in 1879 that resulted in the deaths of a number of British soldiers.

The villagers even manufactured their own guns, based on models acquired in the plains of Assam. This particular gun required two people to hold it up, while a third person loaded it.

Another reason for the perceived 'smugness' might be because the village has also produced a number of intellectuals. I'm told the reason for this is that during the British siege, the villagers smuggled out a number of kids to Dimapur where they eventually received their education (and hence the overall better standard of education in the village compared to others in Nagaland). I'm not quite sure how true this is, but in the absence of other explanations, I'm willing to accept it. The village also produced a number of founding members of the Naga independence movement, including Phizo himself.

In any case, Khonoma is a pleasant place to visit if you're in Kohima for the Hornbill Fesitval (although the Southern Angami villages past the Kisama Heritage Village are also quite picturesque - but that's for another post). It prides itself on being a 'green village', and there are rubbish bins all over the village which to my eye are actually used. To my surprise, I learnt that the village still has a functioning morung, a kind of dormitory where young men were sent to learn about traditional ways and to form bonds with members of their peer group. (It was even more of a surprise for me because Hutton in his book The Angami Nagas mentions that the morung wasn't very significant to the Angamis). Some villages also had a female equivalent, although I was told there was none in Khonoma at the present time.

The streets are generally well maintained, with competitions between the various peer groups, known as peli in Tenyidie (the standard Angami dialect used in church and schools). Here, one can see the work of one peli working on a section of road, so that they don't get outdone by other peli who are in charge of other sections of the same road.

My Angami friends in Kohima organised the visit for us. We had a local guide named Michael, who used to be the president of the students' union here (I believe), and who was very knowledgeable about the village's history.

I don't normally do such recommendations, but I was quite impressed by his role in organising the members of the village to maintain its cleanliness and preserve the local wildlife. I would say that many villages in Nagaland could benefit from learning from Khonoma's system of organisation, but I don't want to inflate the villagers' egos any further!

If you are interested in visiting Khonoma village, you can contact Mr Michael Saphi (Khonoma Tours & Treks) at +91 98 5655 9394.

Hornbill Festival 2012

So the Hornbill Festival at Kisama has come and gone. This year I brought a friend from Australia along to enjoy the festivities. After my experiences at the festival last year and the year before, I didn't really want to spend all week in Kisama, since many of the shows start to feel repetitive after a few days. I thought it'd be best if we arrive on the 4th day for the last few days, then stay back a few more days to enjoy some of the sights around Kohima when most of the other tourists would have moved on. I think it was a good decision (as I sit here typing this in our now empty guest house).

My friend quite enjoyed the whole event, which his colleague in Melbourne had described last year as 'better than National Geographic', which makes me laugh a little. Sadly, in this post I won't be waxing lyrical about the festival, but would like to point out a few things that made me quite unhappy and in the process, perhaps raise a few questions about the future of the festival.

Looking at the photo below, you might notice the big black stage that was set up right next to the performance area, taking up a large chunk of what was previously audience space. This stage was used for the opening and closing ceremonies of the festival, on the 1st and 7th of December respectively. In between those two days, it seems that the stage was not used at all.

As far as I could see, additional seating had not been provided (apart from some reserved seats for soldiers and their families), even though a third of the previous years' seating was now taken up by a stage that was largely non-functional for the majority of the festival. And when it was used, the sight lines were so bad because of the large speakers, that many people sitting in the audience area (myself included) weren't able to see the actual performance onstage and had to resort to watching a small screen at the back of the stage. It seems the only people with a proper view of the stage were the people in the VIP area.

This non-consideration of general audience members was apparent during all the cultural performances too. While some performances were geared to the audience, most of them, especially the song items were not oriented to the general seating area, but to the VIP booth.

The Zeliang cultural troupe performing a song for the VIPs

If I now asked: "Who is the festival really for?", the answer would be rather straightforward. Not Nagas from all over the state. Not tourists, domestic and foreign. It's the small group of people that the organisers have deemed 'very important'.

I'm sorry, but people didn't come all this way to see performers' behinds while they perform. (Okay, maybe some people did, but only to take photos of them in costume.)

I was particularly disappointed at the closing ceremony - it didn't help that I could barely see the stage. At one point, the performers from the various cultural troupes had to get up and form the usual lines to welcome the Chief Guest who, as custom dictates, arrived late. In the middle of their chanting and singing, the 'pre-entertainment' started on the opposite side of the performance area, where singers on the big black stage started their renditions of ABBA and Bruce Springstein, while Bebop dancers popped and locked to Michael Jackson and the Black-eyed Peas. Given the much louder competition from the stage, many of the cultural troupes eventually stopped their own singing to watch the concert, as it was unclear when Neiphiu Rio was actually going to turn up.

What could have been 'cultural fusion' had turned into 'cultural confusion', with modern pop music drowning out the traditional (or rather, the acceptable version of 'traditional').

Once the Chief Guest arrived, the audience was treated to a concert, but it eventually took two hours for the large bonfire to be lit. During the concert, audience members were encouraged to come and dance, and many did, even though my friends and I thought it would have been much better to finish the formalities, like lighting the fire before asking people to jump in and let loose. I felt quite sorry for many of the cultural troupes, especially villagers from the eastern parts of Nagaland who looked cold as they shivered through the concert. A large bonfire while the concert was going on would have much more comfortable.


The question here I posed was: "Who is the concert for?" Maybe it was to expose the villagers, especially from the eastern regions to modern culture? It didn't look like many of them enjoyed it though. Maybe it was for the tourists, to show people them that 'Nagas are modern'. But after 2 hours of listening to Adele, Celine Dion, Psy and ABBA, my friends and I were saying, "Yes, we get it: Nagas are modern. Just light the damn fire already!"

Perhaps it was most obvious, when in the middle of the show, there was a request made to the Chief Minister to let the youth 'party a little bit more'. What could have been interpreted previously as an act of education, I now simply viewed as an act of self-indulgence, at the expense of all other audience members. Of course, even before the fire was lit, many younger audience members had already left, presumably to the Hornbill Rock Festival at the IG Stadium on the other side of Kohima.

In a number of ways, I think this year's festival truly reflected Nagaland in its current state. You could see the over-privileging of a small elite, the over-indulgence of youth consumerist culture, and the general struggle for a sense of cultural identity in today's world.

I don't think there's an easy way to address any of these issues. However, before I encourage other friends to come attend this festival (which itself was a creation of the government), I think the organisers need to sit down and reflect on who the festival is really for: Nagas (and which ones in particular), tourists (domestic or foreign) or just the VIPs?

Ahuna Festival 2012, Zunheboto (III)

The final performance at last week's Ahuna festival in Zunheboto was by the boys from North Point Colony, Zunheboto. They performed the game/dance called Imu no pi 'süjo süjo', which translates as 'My older brother said 'sujo sujo'.' The word süjo is a verb meaning 'to pull out'.

Here are some photos and videos of the game.

One guy has a 'tiger's tail' attached to his behind.

 

 Despite the fact that it's quite a famous game here, I'd never actually seen it before. I tried asking friends about the rules of the game, but no one could really tell me what they were.

A few days later, I asked H. S. Rotokha what the significance of the game was. He told me that there was once a man who had three sons. When the man was about to die, he called his sons together to tell them not to fight among each other after his death, lest their enemies take advantage of this.

Unfortunately, at this point in our conversation, dinner was ready and he had to stop the explanation.

So now, I'm still pretty clueless as to the rules of the game, or its cultural significance. Perhaps someone who comes across this blog post can explain it to me?

With that said, I hope everyone had a happy Ahuna!

My only disappointment was that I didn't get to eat any ahuna, i.e. the newly harvested rice cooked in a bamboo vessel (read here)!

Ahuna Festival 2012, Zunheboto (II)

So the turn-out at the Ahuna celebration in Zunheboto was small in comparison to the one in Dimapur, but here were some of the highlights of the cultural performances. I was a little disappointed that the organisers decided to make all 4 cultural troupes perform at the same time, so you'd have to rush from performance to performance, with no clear sense of what you were seeing if you didn't already know what the troupes were doing (and also only if you were lucky enough to be able to enter the performance area - most of the spectators from the town had to sit at a distance).

Thankfully, I was allowed into the performance area, and was already familiar with most of the performances because of the cultural documentation project.

The villagers from Chishilimi perform the rain invocation ceremony called Tala Dala (or Dala Dala). According to them, they are the only Sumi village to perform this ceremony, which involves two rows of men taking turns to hit a raised mound of earth with long sticks. The action of hitting the mound is quite similar to the action of hitting the creeper called ayichi during community fishing (called ayichi küvvü).

In addition to the men hitting the raised mound with the sticks, others stand to the side pulling strips of bamboo (I think), while others swing bits of bamboo attached to a piece of string, all of which make a sort of buzzing noise, that I believe is supposed to 'call the thunder'.

They also performend hango leh, which is a song sung while sowing.

The men from the village of Khükiye-Lukhai did aphila kuwo, which is often mistranslated as a 'war dance', since it was never performed by warriors before they went off to battle, or by victorious warriors. It was simply a dance performed during festivals.

The women from Khükiye-Lukhai performed thigha leh, a song sung while breaking up the soil with sticks, usually performed after hoeing (phushe) has been done.

Some men from Zunheboto performed winnowing of the paddy. According to H.S. Rotokha, the proper way was to have one man waving the paddy sifter up and down (along the vertical axis), while another waved his from left to right (along the horizontal axis).

And the women from Lazami village performed a thread spinning song called aye küzü, while 'spinning' thread from balls of harvested cotton.

They also demonstrated how fabric used to be dyed black and red (the most important Sumi colours). Here we have a pot of black dye.

Here's the red dye.

The GB (at least I think he was the GB - someone can correct me on this) of Lazami village showed me the plant used to make the red dye, called aghüsa in Sumi.

And here we have a close-up of the aghüsa plant.

Alright, just one more post about Ahuna!

Ahuna Festival 2012, Zunheboto (I)

I was in Zunheboto town all of last week for the Ahuna / Ahunah (post-harvest) festival, and to get some project work done. I'm still recovering from the trip back to Guwahati, but here's a quick recap of last week's events.

Monday night, we had the premiere of the film The Silent Field, or Yenguyelei Qha in Sumi. It's something that has come out of the cultural documentation project that Abokali and I have been working on the past 2 years with H.S. Rotokha and Pukhazhe Yepthomi. Most of the work on this film was done by Abokali and our wonderful video editor Vito Sumi (who had to work with most of our amateur footage), but I'll get to that in another blog post. Just to be clear, it's still a first edit that we were trying to rush for this year's Ahuna festival, but we hope people still enjoyed it.

From L to R: Me, H. S. Rotokha, Abokali Sumi, Pukhazhe Yepthomi.

Before I get into the cultural activities in my next post, I thought I'd just talk about the entrance to the festival ground.

The photos below [WARNING: some nudity] are of what I think was a modern take on an old tradition: the genna post. The word genna appears to come from the Angami kenna, which according to Hutton, in his book The Angami Nagas, translates as 'prohibition' (1921: 190), though the meaning of the term is quite broad and would deserve a blog post of its own. [Note that the Sumi equivalent is chine, presumably related to the Angami word, but with the initial velar stop palatalisating before the front vowel /i/.]

The post was erected at the entrance to the local ground, with the words sasüvi, meaning 'welcome' in Sumi.

On the right side, we see the chief guests for all the various events this Ahuna festival. Since every single event needs its own chief guest, a very important part of modern Naga culture.

And on the other side, we have pictures of the moon, sun, pieces of meat (steak actually), tiger, a pair of and a mithun head. Yes, disembodied breasts. I had to do a double take on that, especially given the highly conservative nature of Baptist Zunheboto.

I have no idea who commissioned the post, but it does bear the elements of a traditional Sumi genna post. Of such posts, Hutton (in 1921) wrote:

Genna posts, whether the front centre post of the house or the forked posts set up outside it, are carved both in high relief and with incisions, the latter taking the form of horizontal lines, crosses, circles, or arcs, and used to fill in space not devoted to the serious carving, which generally consists of mithan heads more or less conventionalised, and highly conventional representations of the article of ceremonial dress known as "enemies' teeth " (aghühu). ... The only living thing other than mithan which seems to be represented in Sema art is the bird, which is carved out of a piece of wood and fixed to a crossbar between the "snail-horns" of the house. ... The sun and moon are also represented, usually as plain circles or concave discs, also breasts, singly, not in pairs, significant of success in love, and wooden dao slings. - The Sema Nagas (1921: 48)

I'm not sure if anyone was offended by them (I suspect some people might have been ), but as you can see, there was some cultural precedent for them, even badly photoshopped ones. Of course, it doesn't completely match Hutton's description, but I'm sure there were others types of genna posts that he didn't get to document.


For most of the festival I was actually busy at the Sumi Cultural Association stall (since the members were busy with the main festival events.) We were selling DVDs of the film, as well as calendars for 2013.

The calendars (tsalaphi) are unique in that they are completely in Sumi, with short explanations about the Sumi names for the various months. They are also accompanied by photos depicting the traditional agricultural activities / events typically associated with each particular month.

Here's our little (unofficial) calendar mascot. The girls helping us run the stall picked him up on the first day.

If you're interested in purchasing a calendar and live in Zunheboto, you can contact the Sumi Cultural Association in Zunheboto town. Alternatively, we will be trying to make them available in Dimapur, and also at the Hornbill Festival in Kohima. More information to come.

1st Sumi MT Literacy Development Workshop (Oct 2012)

For this special 200th post, I thought I'd cover something that I had the joy and honour of organising and running in Zunheboto last week. It was the very first Sumi Mother Tongue Literacy Development Workshop. The workshop ran from 23 Oct 2012 till 26 Oct 2012, and was conducted by the North East Literacy Network, represented by Palash Nath and Luke Horo, with the support of SIL International and also our wonderful benefactors in Melbourne, Inotoli Zhimomi and Nick Lenaghan.

Our very humble hand-written notice on the white board

It was hosted by the Sumi Literature Board and held at the Sütsah Academy in Zunheboto.

This workshop was meant to be a first step towards teaching Sumi as a subject in the private schools in Zunheboto (which mostly use English as the medium of instruction), with the further possibility of teaching content subjects in Sumi, along with a gradual transition to English. The philosophy here is that children learn better through a language they are familiar with. Importantly, they also learn to read and write more quickly in a language that they already know.

The first aim of this workshop was to introduce to the participants the importance and rationale behind the use of the mother tongue / home language in an educational setting. With a well-implemented program, research around the world has shown that children have the opportunity to to do better in school, and even learn other languages such as English better than children who are plunged into an all English-medium school from class 1, especially when they don't receive much exposure to English outside the classroom.

The second aim was to look at ways to develop a syllabus throughout the whole year. Here, the concept of a 'cultural calendar' was introduced, to get teachers to think about what the children are experiencing in the real world during every part of the calendar year, and using that to build the syllabus. Again, the focus is on moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar. This can then lead to 'reintroducing' children to more traditional practices that are no longer being transmitted from the older generation, and can serve as a kind of cultural revitalisation.

Participants on the 2nd day of the workshop. 2nd and 3rd from the left: Scato Swu and Hokishe Yeptho (Sumi Literature Board)

The final aim was then to bring the participants through the process of producing basic materials to teach children to read in Sumi. One issue that consistently pops up in these workshops, as noted by Palash and Luke, is that the first time people write such stories, they are usually suitable for adults. The stories are often too long, the language too difficult, and the stories don't lend themselves to being 'pictured' (having a picture accompany every line of text).

About half of the workshop was spent on producing materials that children would be able to enjoy. Other materials included: primers, riddle books, rhymes, posters depicting scenes familiar to them. Younger ones may not necessarily be able to read the words in the story books, but the pictures should be able to help them (and older non-literate speakers of the language) follow the story.

Here we have some teachers (along with the talented Mr Toino) writing and illustrating their own childrens' books.

Within just 4 days, the teachers managed to produce 10 books! Of course, they still need to be checked for spelling, grammar and punctuation, and also tested with children to see if the language used is appropriate, whether the pictures are able to tell the story etc. They will also eventually need to be graded by target age of the reader. 

The teachers told us that the books they were working on at home generated a lot of interest and excitement amongst their families and neighbours. This is the kind of excitement we hope to continue to generate, as people see their language written down in formats they are not used to.

At the end of last day, the workshop facilitators were presented with these lovely traditional Sumi shawls / aqhumu. Technically, I think this particular shawl used to be worn only by men who had killed a mithun / avi / Indian bison. But I suppose nowadays it could be a symbol of any kind of accomplishment.

From L to R: Luke Horo; myself; Jekügha Assümi (principal, Step by Step School); H S Rotokha; Nihoshe Jimomi (Sumi Literature Board); Palash Nath.

A VERY big thank you to the hosts, especially to H S Rotokha who came every single day for the duration of the workshop. And to the teachers: Sharon K Jimo, Aghatoli Jimo, Aviholi Kiba, Atoyi Awomi and Amento Achumi. Also special thanks to Toino, for helping us with the illustrations and kindly acting as our driver.

If you're Sumi and would like to help out with this project, please get in touch by leaving a comment below, or by contacting the Sütsah Academy. This is a long-term project that requires a lot of community support. We need people to come up with more stories - you may also want to ask your parents / grandparents for more traditional stories to draw inspiration from. We need people to do illustrations. We need people to help train others to create new materials, with the possibility for some people to be sent to Guwahati and elsewhere in India to receive further training from international and local experts.

Most importantly, we need people to advocate for the use of Sumi in schools, at least in the Zunheboto district where Sumi is the predominant language used in households. We are certainly aware of the need for English (and possibly Hindi) to get a job in India, but what we are trying to make people understand is that by introducing English through the mother tongue, children can actually go further (than simply parroting what is being taught in class and regurgitating it during exam time).