Wancho (वांचो‎) is a Konyak language of north-eastern

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

. Wancho is spoken in 36 villages of southeastern

Longding district Longding district (Pron:/lɒŋˈdɪŋ/) is one of the 20 administrative districts of Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India. It was carved out of the south-western portion of the Tirap District. The district shares its boundary to the south an ...

, Tirap district,

Arunachal Pradesh Arunachal Pradesh (; ) is a States and union territories of India, state in northeast India. It was formed from the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) region, and India declared it as a state on 20 February 1987. Itanagar is its capital and la ...

, as well as in

Assam Assam (, , ) is a state in Northeast India, northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra Valley, Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . It is the second largest state in Northeast India, nor ...

and

Nagaland Nagaland () is a States and union territories of India, state in the northeast India, north-eastern region of India. It is bordered by the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh to the north, Assam to the west, Manipur to the south, and the Naga Sel ...

(''

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...

''). Alternate names include Banpara Naga, Joboka, Jokoba.

People

Wancho is spoken by the Wancho people who have a population of 56,866 according to a 2011 consensus, and mainly populate the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Although a minority, these inhabitants have a rich culture with rituals, ceremonial practices, religion, and various dialects of Wancho. Shukla Wancho Ngun

Dialects

'' lists the following dialects of Wancho. *Changnoi *Bor Muthun (Bor Mutonia) *Horu Muthun *Kulung Muthun (Mithan) There is significant variation among the dialects spoken in the upper and lower regions.

Orthography

Wancho is generally written in either

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

. Between 2001 and 2012, teacher Banwang Losu devised a unique alphabetic Wancho script which is taught in some schools. In 2019, the script was officially published into

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

12.0.

References

*Robbins Burling & Mankai Wangsu (1998
"Wancho Phonology and word list"
''Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area'' 21.2. Languages of Assam Languages of Arunachal Pradesh Languages of Nagaland Sal languages Endangered languages of India Languages written in Devanagari {{st-lang-stub