Gyani Maiya Sen Kusunda

Gyani Maiya Sen-Kusunda (1937-2020) was the most fluent native speaker of the Kusunda language of Nepal and she appeared in many documentary films including Gyani Maiya (2019). She was born around 1937 in the Dang district of Western Nepal. She was from a nomadic indigenous group called Kusunda/Mihaq that spoke the "Kusunda" or "Gi Mihaq" (meaning: the king's language) language. Through a long process of inter-marriages, settling in villages and cultural assimilation, the Kusunda people started losing their language over the time. Sen-Kusunda and her younger sister Kamala Sen Khatri remained the only two fluent speakers of the Kusunda language which is a critically endangered language. (Watters) After the critical state of her language was known thanks to wider publications, many researchers and documentary linguists have attempted to document the language. Uday Raj Aaley, an independent and local researcher who authored a comprehensive Kusunda-Nepali-English dictionary has studied the language in detail through documenting oral history while having conversations with Sen-Kusunda. (Aaley and Bodt) He continues to teach local children the Kusunda language since 2018, even after the death of Sen-Kusunda. Reference: Watters, David. "Notes on Kusunda grammar: A language isolate of Nepal." Himalayan Linguistics (2006). Aaley, Uday Raj, and Timotheus A. Bodt. "Meet the Professionals: Uday Raj AAaley: Language teacher." Babel, The Language Magazine 30: 44-45 (2020).