Uday Raj Aaley is a language researcher, lexicographer, writer and activist from Nepal. He is known for documenting and revitalising the

moribund Moribund refers to a literal or figurative state near death. Moribund may refer to: * ''Moribund'' (album), a 2006 album by the Norwegian black metal band Koldbrann * " Le Moribond", a song by Jacques Brel known in English as "Seasons in the Sun ...

Kusunda language Kusunda or Kusanda (endonym ) is a language isolate spoken by a few among the Kusunda people in western and central Nepal. As of 2023, it only has a single fluent speaker, Kamala Sen-Khatri, although there are efforts underway to keep the lan ...

and teaching it to young children along with Kusunda elders Gyani Maiya Sen-Kusunda and Kamala Sen-Khatri. In 2019, he and Timotheus Adrianus Bodt raised funds to document audio and video materials in Kusunda and create a list of 250 concepts in Kusunda. Aaley has indicated the lack of

prescriptive grammar Linguistic prescription is the establishment of rules defining publicly preferred usage of language, including rules of spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc. Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach w ...

in Kusunda to generalise and formalise Kusunda in his research findings.

Early life

Uday Raj Aaley was born in western Nepal and is a native

Magar language Magar Dhut (, ) is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken mainly in Nepal, southern Bhutan, and in Darjeeling, Assam and Sikkim, India, by the Magar people. It is divided into two groups (Eastern and Western) and further dialect divisions give distin ...

speaker.

Career

Aaley began documenting the Kusunda language in 2010s and published the trilingual (English-Nepali-Kusunda) dictionary ''Kusunda Jatira Shabdakosh'' in 2017. He began an education programme together with Gyani Maiya Sen-Kusunda and Kamala Sen-Khatri in January 2019 for teaching 20 children Kusunda with support from Nepal's Language Commission. The bilingual (Nepali-Kusunda) education resources created in this programme were the first materials in Kusunda. In 2019, he and Timotheus Adrianus Bodt raised US$5,000 from a grant from

Endangered Language Fund The Endangered Language Fund (ELF) is a small non-profit organization based in New Haven, Connecticut. ELF supports endangered language maintenance and documentation projects that aim to preserve the world's languages while contributing rare lingu ...

and a crowd-funding campaign on

GoFundMe GoFundMe is an American for-profit crowdfunding platform that allows people to raise money for events ranging from life events such as celebrations and graduations to challenging circumstances like accidents and illnesses. From 2010 to the ...

to document audio and video materials in Kusunda and create a list of 250 concepts in Kusunda. He collaborated with Nepalese-American not-for-profit Archive Nepal and received a grant from the British Council in 2023 to develop courses to teach Kusunda online and to

higher secondary Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC), Higher Secondary School Certificate, Higher Secondary Education Certificate (HSEC) or Intermediate Examination is a secondary education qualification in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. It is equivalent to the f ...

students through bilingual Nepali-Kusunda books.

Bibliography

* ''Kusunda Jatira Shabdakosh'' (2017) * ''Gemyehak: King of the Forest'' (2023) *''Kusunda Gipan'' * ''Tharu Brihat Shabd Kosh''

References

External links

* {{Improve categories, date=September 2024 21st-century Nepalese male writers Language activists Magar people