Over this past summer, senior Sohum Sukhatankar wrote and published a new book titled Exploring Endangered Languages. During a nine-day trip to northeast India, Sukhatankar came across many tribes speaking languages that he had no knowledge of before.
Slowly getting replaced by languages like Assamese and Hindi, these tribal languages were dying out.
“When I started taking Latin in seventh grade, it struck me; Latin is more than 2000 years old, and we’re able to learn so much about Roman culture and history through just the language,” Sukhatankar said.
Fueled by his curiosity of these endangered languages, he started to interview members of the tribes, the professors studying them and went to tribal heritage museums. During the end of his junior year, he self-published an 80-page report. Instantly, there was support for the book.
“When I talked to the members of the tribes, it struck me how much they appreciated my actions,” Sukhatankar said. “Some of them would give me dictionaries of the language or other tokens of appreciation.”
Exploring Endangered Languages also opened windows of opportunity for him. He used the book to help him get an online internship at Living Tongues, an endangered language company, where he edited dictionaries of other endangered Indian languages.
Sukhatankar’s book is just the beginning of his interest.
“Once I’m in college, I plan to major in linguistics,” Sukhatankar said. “As far as the actual impact the book has had on me, I’d say I definitely want to do more meaningful work with it in the future.”
Friends and family members made sure to congratulate Sukhatankar for his success and dedication in this field of work at such a young age.
“One of the people I interviewed made a Facebook post,” Sukhatankar said. “It’s cool to see how much it meant to both my friends and the people I interviewed.”
