Dirang Monpa

Dirang Monpa is spoken in the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh by the Monpa tribe inhabiting the Dirang circle and comes under the umbrella of Tibeto-Burman languages. According to the 2011 Census of India, the urban and the rural population of speakers of Dirang Monpa is 7172. In some places, the term ’Central Monpa’ is also used to refer to Dirang Monpa (Monpa et al., 2018). Blench (2014) points it out that Monpa is the general term for the people belonging to the south of Tibet that do not speak Tibetan.

There are different types of Monpa, and the clustering so far has been anything but easy. These are Chug, Lish, Sartang (also known as But Monpa, according to Blench (2014)), Tawang Monpa, Kalaktang Monpa and Dirang Monpa. The first three are clustered under what is called the ’Mey’ language cluster. Except for some common tibetoburman root, the Tawang Monpa and Dirang monpa have no resemblance, however, the the one language which shares features with Dirang is Tshangla from Bhutan (Blench, 2014).

On an historic anecdotal note, there is a belief amongst the speakers that when the Tibetan settlers first came in the vicinity of the Dirang circle, they uttered the word Dirang, where di and rang according to the speakers in Tibetan means ’this place’ (CIIL, 2017). Since the Dirang Monpas do not have a written record of the history the claims cannot be verified. On a religious note, The Dirang Monpas practice tibetan Buddhism (Mahayana buddhism to be exact) as their faith and link being Monpas itself to having a buddhist identity.