A Bangladeshi Language You’ve Never Heard of is Dying
Tucked away in the remote hills of Bandarban, Rengmitcha currently only has five speakers left. When these people are gone, what would happen to the language?
Some languages don’t die overnight. They just slowly fade away over a few generations. A handful of words stop getting used, kids still understand their grandparents but don't really speak the tongue themselves, and eventually, all that’s left are bits and pieces. Then there are the languages where you can literally count the remaining speakers on one hand. Rengmitcha is one of those.
Tucked away in the remote hills of Alikadam Upazila of Bandarban, this Kuki-Chin language was already rare, with only 32 documented speakers recorded not so long ago. By the early 2020s, only six were left. Recently, another speaker passed away, leaving just a tiny handful of locals who still know the words.
The Multiling Cloud Project has 129 minutes of Rengmitcha recorded in their digital archive. “We stayed there (Alikadam) for about seven to eight days. The speakers had been informed in advance. They walked long distances, crossing hills, to reach Alikadam. Afterwards, they had to make the same journey back home,” said Mesbahul Ibn Munir, Project Manager of the Multiling Cloud Project.
Closely related to Mro and Khumi, the language has no traditional written script. That means Rengmitcha's future is tied almost entirely to the people who still speak it. And when those people are gone, what exactly disappears with them?
When a language dies, we lose so much more than words
It’s easy to think of a language as a giant collection of words. So, if one starts fading away, you’d assume the fix is simple: why not write everything down, put it in a dictionary, and keep it on a shelf for safekeeping? While that’s something, language isn’t just about vocabulary.
Language is how a community makes sense of the world around them. It’s their punchlines, their lullabies, their family traditions, and even memories of how they celebrated good times and survived the bad ones. Language preserves the local wisdom about the soil, the weather, and the wildlife. Additionally, there are always those special words that just lose their magic when you translate them to Bangla or English.
So when a language disappears, we lose a living, breathing way of seeing the world. Every language packages human experience in its own way, carrying centuries of accumulated know-how. You can translate some of it, and you can document plenty of it, but you can never quite capture all of it on paper. That's what makes the threat to Rengmitcha so heartbreaking. So this isn’t a linguistic issue only; it's the risk of losing a piece of human heritage.
When a language disappears, we lose a living, breathing way of seeing the world. Every language packages human experience in its own way, carrying centuries of accumulated know-how.
Does a language need script to be preserved?
A language doesn’t need an alphabet to be sophisticated or legitimate. After all, humanity was chatting, negotiating, and telling stories for millennia before writing came along. Rengmitcha isn't missing anything fundamental. It’s a whole, living language in its own right. What writing does do, though, is act as an anchor. When you put words on paper, you can save them, teach them in classrooms, or adapt them for modern tech. Without that, a language relies entirely on human memory.
When a language like Rengmitcha has so few voices left, that reliance becomes precarious. Every remaining speaker carries a treasure trove of knowledge. Losing someone doesn't just mean grieving a person; it can mean losing pronunciations, expressions, and wisdom that were never recorded.
Back in 2023, a Mro researcher named Yangan Mro put together Mitca Takhak, which may be the only Rengmitcha dictionary out there. It packs in about 3,400 words, which is great, but because Rengmitcha doesn't have its own written script, he had to use Mro and Bengali letters to write it all down. It’s a big step for saving the language, but it doesn’t address a number of questions.
Can someone who speaks Rengmitcha actually use the dictionary if they don't already read Mro or Bengali? Is this going to spark a revival among the younger generation, or will it just end up collecting dust at a university library? And when a language is written using another community's script, does that make it more accessible, or does it just remind everyone that their one script is missing?
Communication barriers during language documentation are not unique to Rengmitcha. Recalling one such experience, Mesbahul Ibn Munir said: “When we went to collect Lushai, one of the speakers from the Lushai community understood Lushai but spoke very little Bangla. So we had a Bom speaker with us. Whatever we wanted the Lushai speaker to say or pronounce, the Bom speaker would first explain it to them in the Bom language. Once the Lushai speaker understood, they would then say it in Lushai. So there was a communication gap”
The lack of a script is not the reason Rengmitcha is on the verge of dying, but it makes the work of preserving it a much trickier race against time.
The lack of a script is not the reason Rengmitcha is on the verge of dying, but it makes the work of preserving it a much trickier race against time.
Languages don’t just vanish into thin air
We often hear this neat little narrative that endangered languages die out simply because the younger generation stops caring. It is a convenient way of sidestepping around an uncomfortable truth: that languages erode within systems of power. In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, indigenous communities have a complex multilingual landscape, but Bengali overwhelmingly dominates state education, administration, and public life. For an indigenous child, the language that opens doors to employment, government services, and the wider world isn’t the one spoken at home.
So, why would a child pour energy into a language they can’t use in school, on official forms, or in a workplace? The reality is, they have very little reason to. Telling these communities to "just speak their language more" ignores the massive economic pressures they face. Parents aren't abandoning their roots; they're trying to give their kids a fighting chance.
Society has structured its institutions so that indigenous languages carry no currency. The existing power structures provide indigenous youth with little to no incentives for maintaining their heritage. Until we change what our institutions actually accommodate, expecting marginalised languages to survive purely on goodwill is a non-starter.
Society has structured its institutions so that indigenous languages carry no currency.
This is exactly why preserving a language isn’t going to keep it alive. We need to revitalise endangered languages. It’s about making the language part of everyday life again. That means teaching it to children, building classroom materials, creating custom fonts and keyboards, writing songs, telling stories, and getting young people excited to use it online and at home.
Can technology save a language?
To stop endangered languages from fading away, the Multiling Cloud Project was launched. It’s run by the Bangladesh Computer Council under the ICT division. They have been in operation since 2016, and one of their main goals is simple: digitise indigenous languages so they’re preserved for future generations.
According to Mesbahul Ibn Munir, Project Manager of the Multiling Cloud Project, the project's first priority is straightforward: “Languages naturally evolve over time. As they continue to develop, they change, and in many cases they transform into different forms. With that in mind, we wanted to digitally preserve the nearly 42 languages spoken in Bangladesh so that they would remain available as resources for researchers. All of this data is intended to be publicly accessible.”
Today’s tech offers possibilities that past linguists could only dream about. Digital archives let us preserve pronunciation, sentence structures, songs, and everyday banter. Eventually, AI might even help build learning tools for languages that were never really written down.
But we have to be realistic about what tech can actually do. A database isn't going to build a living, breathing community. Sure, an audio track preserves how a language sounded and the stories people shared, but it can’t rebuild the daily life that made the language worth speaking in the first place.
None of this makes recording languages pointless, though. Quite the opposite. A simple dictionary can spark a revival. An audio library can help future generations reconnect with their roots. A digital home ensures a language isn't completely erased from human history, and it might even offer new places for it to exist.
"People do not live forever. Very often, a person dies without passing on everything they know to someone else. If we can preserve even a part of that knowledge, that was the purpose behind using these technologies,” said Mesbahul Ibn Munir.
People do not live forever. Very often, a person dies without passing on everything they know to someone else. If we can preserve even a part of that knowledge, that was the purpose behind using these technologies.
But the goal shouldn’t just be to turn endangered languages into museum exhibits that people only study once the last speakers are gone. The far more hopeful path is using documentation as a foundation that communities can use to teach, learn, create, and get talking again. Rengmitcha is right on the edge; you can count its remaining speakers on one hand. But its story shouldn't just turn into a cold list of words in a database.
That’s why there’s such a massive difference between just documenting a language and actually giving it a future. For example, Latin has survived in libraries, universities, and churches for centuries, yet it remains a dead language because no community grows up speaking it as its mother tongue. You can record every single detail of a language, put it safely in an archive, and still watch it die out.