Across Nepal, as in much of the world, language communities are shifting from speaking indigenous languages to speaking exclusively languages of wider communication. The Dhimal community, a small ethnic group in the eastern Tarai, is among those experiencing rapid recent language shift. While most Dhimal people over 20 years old speak Dhimal fluently (in addition to Nepali, some Hindi and English), today few children under age ten speak the language. The reasons for this change are familiar and understandable, including pressure to use Nepali and English at school, the impression that Dhimal is not only irrelevant but detrimental to attempts to gain foreign employment, and in-migration that has left Dhimals a small minority in their homeland.
Language shift, while tied to these large processes, is also an interactional phenomenon. Drawing from a year of ethnographic research in Jhapa and Morang Districts, I investigate the patterns of interaction that allow children to grow up without learning to speak Dhimal, despite hearing their older relatives speak Dhimal. I describe patterns of everyday linguistic practices, including the spatial and generational distribution of speaking Dhimal, Nepali and other languages, that keep children from learning Dhimal at home. I argue that these interactional patterns are tied to aspirations about education and employment, and also to speakers’ understandings of their marginalization in Nepal and the world.