The Last Voice of Khamyang: Bhogeswar Thomung and the Fight to Save an Endangered Language

In a village called Pawaimukh, on the Burhi Dihing river near Margherita in the Tinsukia district of Assam, India, lives an 84-year-old Buddhist priest called Bhogeswar Thomung. He once ran a school where children were taught in Khamyang, the language of his people.

Today, linguists believe he is the last person in the world fully proficient in Khamyang, able to speak, read, write and understand the language completely.

When he is gone, there may remain only the recordings, the manuscripts and a few surviving words of a language that travelled over mountains and rivers for several centuries to reach Assam.

This is the story of the language, the people who spoke it, and the race to save it.

A note on the name: news reports spell his surname as Thomung, Thmung or Thumung. This article uses Thomung, the spelling used by the national news agency PTI.

Who are the Tai Khamyang?

The Khamyang are a small Tai-speaking community in Assam. They are one of several Tai groups who migrated to North-East India from the valleys of South East Asia, along with communities such as the Tai Phake, Tai Khamti, Tai Aiton and Tai Turung. They are also known as Shyam, a name some writers connect with Siam, the old name for Thailand.

Their name has been interpreted in different ways. According to community tradition, it refers to the gold they once collected from the rivers of their early homeland in what is now Kachin State in Myanmar.

Estimates of the community’s size vary. Recent reports put it at around 1,000 to 1,400 people living in the Tinsukia, Sivasagar and Golaghat districts, with some in Jorhat and Dibrugarh. A 2026 documentary on the language put the number at around 1,200.

Like other Tai groups in Assam, the Khamyang are Buddhist, and the vihar (monastery) has long been at the centre of community life.

A long journey to Assam

The history of the Khamyang people comes mostly from their own traditions and the work of a few scholars. These accounts aren’t always precise, but they tell a remarkable story.

According to a community account recorded by researchers, a group of Khamyangs was once sent by a Tai king named Sukhanpha to look for his brother, Sukapha, the founder of the Ahom kingdom of Assam in the thirteenth century. The group is said to have settled by a lake called Nawng Yang for a long period before moving on.

The same account says the Khamyangs resettled in Assam around 1780, during the final, troubled years of the Ahom kingdom, and that the community was scattered by the conflicts of that time. One group reached Dhali in 1798, and another settled near Dibrugarh before moving to Pawaimukh in 1922.

Bhogeswar Thomung’s own memory adds another chapter. In a 2020 interview, he recalled that his community came from Khamti Ghat near Dibrugarh, and that during the Second World War the British moved them into the forest at a place called Lakhimi, where many elders died, before they returned and rebuilt the village.

Dates in these oral histories should be treated with care, but they show how often the community was uprooted, and how its language survived many moves.

What kind of language is Khamyang?

Khamyang is a Tai language of the Kra-Dai (Tai-Kadai) family. It is distantly related to Thai and Lao, and closely related to other Tai languages of North-East India such as Tai Phake, Tai Aiton and Tai Khamti. Linguist Stephen Morey, who has studied the Tai languages of Assam, found it very similar to Tai Phake.

Like other Tai languages, Khamyang is tonal: the pitch of a word changes its meaning. It is written in an adapted Tai script with tone marks, similar to the scripts used by neighbouring Tai communities. The community has old manuscripts in this script, mostly religious and literary texts.

Its international language code (ISO 639-3) is ksu.

How a language fades: the decline in numbers

The decline of Khamyang can be traced through the numbers reported by researchers over the past two decades:

Year	What was reported	Source
2003	About 50 native speakers, all older adults in Pawaimukh	Linguistic documentation cited on Wikipedia
2007	All speakers over 40 years of age	David Bradley, cited by the Endangered Languages Project
2009	All speakers bilingual in Assamese	Ethnologue, 16th edition
2014	Four fully proficient speakers	Linguist Dr Palash Kumar Nath
2018	Most speakers above 55–60 years of age	Dr Palash Kumar Nath
2026	One fully proficient speaker: Bhogeswar Thomung	Dr Palash Kumar Nath, via PTI

UNESCO lists Khamyang as critically endangered. This is the last stage before extinction: the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language only partially and infrequently.

Some older villagers may still know words or prayers, but according to linguists, only one person can now speak, read, write and understand the language fully.

Why is Khamyang dying out?

No single factor makes a language disappear. Several usually combine, and Khamyang faces almost all of them.

A very small community. With only about a thousand people, scattered across several districts, there have never been many speakers.

Assamese as the everyday language. All Khamyang speakers were found to be fluent in Assamese. Over time, Assamese became the language of school, work, markets and, increasingly, homes.

Communities that stopped speaking it. Khamyang communities in Jorhat and Golaghat districts no longer speak the language. Pawaimukh became its last stronghold.

Changing lives. In his 2020 interview, Bhogeswar Thomung pointed to reduced everyday use, marriages with other communities, and young people moving away for work. He estimated that the language might survive only about thirty more years. Six years later, the situation appears even more serious than he feared.

No place in schools or jobs. When a language isn’t used in education, government or employment, parents often feel their children’s future lies in another language.

Earlier efforts to keep it alive

The community has tried before. In 2001, village elders in Pawaimukh agreed to encourage speaking Khamyang in the village. From 2002, a teacher named Chaw Mihingta taught the language to primary-school children.

Linguists have also documented it. Stephen Morey recorded Khamyang in 2001–2002 and published The Tai Languages of Assam: A Grammar and Texts in 2005. The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) has funded a project to document Khamyang oral literature and manuscripts and create learning materials, and the recordings are stored in the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR).

This work kept the language on scholars’ radar, but it could not stop Assamese from replacing it in everyday life.

2026: digitising what remains

In January 2026, a new initiative was launched in Guwahati. Under its Endangered Language Programme, a community-led project called Digitising Assam documented and archived three endangered languages of Assam: Khamyang, Tai Phake and Singpho.

The project was carried out by the Nanda Talukdar Foundation, associated with author-journalist Mrinal Talukdar, and funded entirely by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) under an agreement signed in April 2025. Dr Palash Kumar Nath, a linguist at the Anundoram Borooah Institute of Language, Art and Culture (ABILAC), was its chief consultant. The work took eight months of fieldwork and digitisation.

For Khamyang, the archive now includes:

• 12 manuscripts, totalling about 650 manuscript leaves;
• about 250 photographs; and
• audio recordings of about 540 commonly used words and phrases.

The material is available to the public online at assamarchive.org.

At the launch, Bhogeswar Thomung said that language binds a people together and that fading languages must be preserved. He also said Khamyang isn’t difficult to learn and that he is willing to teach it, but regretted that few people show interest.

Dr Nath warned that as speakers dwindle, vocabulary shrinks with them. He pointed to the Ruga language, once spoken by a section of the Garo people, as an example of a language in the region that has already been lost.

In May 2026, a documentary titled The Khamyang Story, produced by Mrinal Talukdar and directed by Samujjal Kashyap, was screened at Gauhati University. The film centres on Bhogeswar Thomung and the community’s oral traditions.

The bigger picture: India’s endangered languages

Khamyang is not an exception. According to UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (2009), India had 196 endangered languages, more than any other country listed in the atlas.

The North-East, home to many small communities with their own languages, is especially affected. The neighbouring Tai Phake (about 2,000 speakers) and Singpho (around 9,000) face similar pressures to Khamyang, though not to the same degree.

In 2013, the Government of India started the Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (SPPEL), run by the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysuru. The scheme focuses on languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers or those that have been little studied, and works to produce grammars, dictionaries and community profiles.

Why does losing a language matter?

When a language dies, much more is lost than its words.

Every language carries a culture with it: the local names of plants, fish and medicines, descriptions of the land, prayers, songs, jokes and ways of speaking that don’t translate easily into another language. Khamyang carries the community’s religious texts and the memory of its long journey to Assam.

For linguists, small languages show how human speech works and how languages are related to one another. As one of the Tai languages of Assam, Khamyang can help researchers understand the history of Tai-speaking peoples across Asia.

Can Khamyang be saved?

A full revival is difficult, but several steps can still make a difference:

• Recording everything possible from Bhogeswar Thomung while he is able and willing: vocabulary, grammar, stories, prayers and readings of the manuscripts.
• Teaching the script and basic language to interested young people, even if they never become fully fluent.
• Sharing resources with closely related Tai languages, especially Tai Phake, which still has more speakers.
• Keeping the archive open and usable, so future learners and researchers can access it.
• Community pride. In the end, a language survives only if its own people choose to use it.

Conclusion

The Khamyang language has travelled a long way: from the river valleys of upper Myanmar, through centuries of migration and upheaval, to a single village on the Burhi Dihing. For most of that journey, it was carried by whole communities. Today, as far as linguists know, it is carried in full by one 84-year-old man.

Thanks to scholars, the community and the 2026 digitisation project, Khamyang will not vanish without a trace. Its manuscripts, photographs and recorded words are now preserved. Whether it remains a living language depends on whether anyone takes up Bhogeswar Thomung’s offer to teach it, while he is still there to do so.