Language, Affect, and the Work of Caring for Nepal Bhasa.

Dr Uma Pradhan, UCL

Why do people care about a language? What makes a language worth defending, and how do such attachments become forms of collective action? This paper explores these questions through the Nepal Bhasa Google Translate project led by the World Newa Organisation.

Nepal Bhasa is one of the 124 languages spoken in Nepal (NSO 2025) and has been classified by UNESCO (2010) as ‘definitely endangered’ because of declining fluency among younger generations. While such classifications provide an important context for language activism, they tell us less about why people become invested in the language or why its continued existence matters. Like other indigenous and minoritised languages, Nepal Bhasa is entangled with histories of Newar memory, cultural practice, and political marginalisation. Caring for the language therefore involves sustaining relationships between people and place, past and future, and language and cultural belonging. Rather than treating affect as something that simply accompanies language activism, this paper asks what affect does: how attachments to Nepal Bhasa shape what the language comes to mean, what forms of linguistic work become possible, and what kinds of futures can be imagined.

The paper explores community anxiety, responsibility, and hope for Nepal Bhasa not simply as personal feelings, but as affects that circulate through people, technologies, and imagined futures. The Google Translate project makes these processes particularly visible. Between 2019 and 2024, community contributors gathered linguistic resources, contributed translations, negotiated standardisation, and worked to make Nepal Bhasa computationally legible. Yet this work is also a claim about visibility and value: that Nepal Bhasa belongs within the digital infrastructures of contemporary life and should have a future there. Digital inclusion thus becomes an affective practice through which attachment is transformed into collective labour.

The paper argues that language activism is a process through which affect, meaning, and value are produced together. Attending to affect shifts the analysis beyond whether Nepal Bhasa is ‘alive’ or ‘dying’ towards the relations that make people care, act, and imagine its continuation.

References

Nepal Statistics Office. 2025. National Population and Housing Census 2021: Languages in Nepal. Thapathali, Kathmandu: Nepal Statistics Office. [Available at https://giwmscdnone.gov.np/media/pdf_upload/Language%20in%20Nepal%20for%20website%20final_1khyn42.pdf ].

UNESCO. 2010. Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Paris: UNESCO. [ Available at https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000187026]