A Sociolinguistic Exploration of the Vaiphei Tribe

It is said that the Vaiphei people have come from a khul ‘cave’ but there are no such written records to refer, as it is a belief amongst the elder people of the tribe as it is considered to be an oral myth delivered from generation to generation. Adding to it, it is also believed that the name of the village Khawvaiphei is where the term Vaiphei originates. Vaiphei is a hill tribe with its own language, culture, and identity in Northeast India. The language and community are referred to as Vaiphei, which is interesting. In a similar vein, the majority of the tribal people living in Northeast India have also embraced the usual practice of using their own name as the name of their extended language or dialect. Vaiphei are Mongoloids by ethnicity, and their language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman linguistic family. Despite not being mutually intelligible, it is closely connected to Paite, Hmar, Gangte, Thadou, Kuki, and other languages because they have similar vocabularies. The present paper attempts to provide a preliminary description of the endangered linguistic identity of the Vaiphei speaker of Assam and highlight the sociolinguistics feature of language endangerment in the community.