Students in Tibet reading Minyak primer.
Photo courtesy of the Kham Aid Foundation.
The Minyak people are descended from an ancient tribe that included the Xixia Kingdom in present-day Gansu Province in China. Fifty thousand people spread across four counties once spoke their language, but the inexorable forces of modernization have led Tibetan and Chinese to supplant the local language. Now, the number of Minyak speakers has dwindled to less than twelve thousand - and these are found almost exclusively in remote rural areas in the Sichuan Province of China. In December 2007, the Genographic Legacy Fund awarded a grant to the Kham Aid Foundation (KAF) to launch a project with the goal of preserving and perpetuating the Minyak language in Tibet. In partnership with the Minyak Cultural and Environmental Service Group, KAF aimed to collect Minyak words, phrases, and stories, develop a writing system, and reconcile differences in dialects to standardize the language. And they are seeing success. This community led project has increased ethnic pride among the Minyak people and improved the chances that future generations of Minyak people will value and pass on both their language and other unique cultural traditions.
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