Home Work for November 10th 2010

Tampuan : an endangered language ?

The Tampuan, also spelled Tempuan, Tampuon or Campuon, is the native language of an ethnic group that has the same name and who live mainly in the north-eastern Cambodian province of Ratanakiri. We could also find a small part of them in the surrounding Cambodian provinces as well as in the south east of Laos. The language has around 25000 speakers.

While UNESCO define the Tempuan language as "severely endangered"(1), ethnologue.com site consider it however as vigorous(2).

The Tampuan culture and also language were preserved of external influence until the second half of the twentieth century due to their settlements remoteness and also the high prevalence of the strongest forms of some tropical diseases like paludism or dengue fever.

This has changed in the last decades, with the government structure enforcement and the need to speak Khmer, the national official language, in order to access to the public utilities. Also, the road system enhancement has encouraged a large immigration of people who are easy to despoil local illiterate inhabitants.

Today, speaking Tampuan appears as a big handicap for example for people who want to perform study that are mainly in Khmer.

Some experiences, funded by the UNESCO’s Endangered Languages Programme, started at the beginning of the 2000’s to let children start their schooling in their mother tongue and switch gradually in Khmer; they provided encouraging results that need however to be confirmed in a long term period.

Sources:
(1) UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger - Cambodia - Tempuan : http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00206
(2) Ethnologue report for language cope tpu : http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=tpu
(3) Wikipedia - Tampuan : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampuan
(4) Wikipedia - Ratanakiri Province : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratanakiri_Province