| Description |
This is a collection of Wancho traditional folk stories and some recollections about traditional practices. They are told by some elders of the Wancho community, who still know these stories and still know about how these practices were traditionally performed. It also contains a lullaby sung by a younger person.
Language background
Wancho is a language spoken in Northeast India, in Arunachal Pradesh. It is a Tibeto-Burman language belonging to the Patkaian group (Parker van Dam ms.) and has around 56000 speakers living in more than 67 different villages (according to the Indian population census of 2011). The villages are in and around Longding district, and Wancho is also spoken in some villages across the Myanmar border. We generally say there are three Wancho varieties: Upper, Middle and Lower (see also Losu & Morey 2023). The stories in this collection are told by speakers of the Lower and Middle varieties.
Project team
This project was led by Banwang Losu of Kamhua Noknu village. He was assisted by several people: his wife Choinya Wangpan from Niaunu, Wangjen Wangsu from Niaunu, Rongam Chama from Chopnu, Tingkai Wangpan from Niausa and Eline Visser, a linguist from The Netherlands. The metadata for all project participants, including the storytellers, can be found in the collection in a file named speakermetadata_Wancho (identifier spkrmtdt).
Recordings
The stories were recorded in 2025. The speakers were selected from different areas: they come from the villages of Niausa and Niaunu (Middle Wancho) and Chopnu (Lower Wancho). The speakers were filmed in their home villages. Most recordings are traditional folktales, and for several folktales we have different versions from different speakers. Some recordings are about traditional practices such as tattooing and birth rituals. All recordings were made on a Parasonic Lumix camera with an external microphone.
Data processing
The recordings are annotated in the software ELAN. The recordings are transcribed in the Wancho script (Losu 2013, Losu 2021, Losu & Morey 2023). To visualize this script in ELAN, you must download the font Noto Sans Wancho on your computer. Transcriptions of stories in the Middle Wancho variety were done by Wangjen Wangsu, and stories in the Lower and Middle Wancho varieties were transcribed by Rongam Chama. Rongam also did English translations. Tingkai Wangpan did Hindi translations. Banwang Losu checked the transcriptions and translations, added tone marking and wrote the metadata. Eline Visser assisted with the data processing and English translations. Texts that were first translated in Hindi were translated to English with Google Translate, after which a manual check was performed. All English and Hindi translations are free interpretations of the original texts. Eline also added IPA transcriptions. These are pure transliterations from the Wancho script, following Losu & Morey (2023).
Other resources
A collection of Wancho material collected by Stephen Morey is available as collection SM61 in Paradisec.
Tara Douglas performed a study of traditional Wancho house architecture (Douglas 2025 and references therein). She also published a book with Wancho stories (Douglas & Wangsa 2024).
Funding
This project was funded by the Firebird Foundation.
References:
Douglas, Tara. 2025. Building Village Life in Kamhua Noknu, Arunachal Pradesh. Journal of Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, 6, 385-395.
Douglas, Tara & Jangwat Wangsa. 2024. Myth, Memory and Folktale of the Wancho Tribe. The Stories of our Ancestors. New Delhi: Niyogi Books.
Losu, Banwang. 2013. The Wancho script. New Delhi: Partridge India.
Losu, Banwang. 2021. Phonology of the Wancho language and script. Pune: Department of Linguistics, Deccan College, MA dissertation.
Losu, Banwang & Stephen Morey. 2023. The Wancho language of Kamhua Noknu village. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 46(2), 201-234.
Parker van Dam, Kellen. ms. Patkaian (Northern Naga). To appear in Oxford Handbook of Tibeto-Burman Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
