Sampang Language (Sampang Khaa/Gung)

Sampang language is spoken in the north-eastern quadrant of the Khotang District, along what is locally known as the ‘Sampang Khola’, which designates the eastern stretch of the Tap Khola, and also in the area surrounding the Chamowa.
The area mentioned above is the ancestral homeland from which many ethnic Sampang migrated and continue to migrate to the western part of Khotang district and to the east in neighbouring Bhojpur.
Due to this migration, language retention is very low in the Sampang enclaves outside the original homeland. For the most part, after the first generation of migrants died the next generation turned to the dominant language in the area in which their parents had settled. This language was usually Nepali, but in the west, some older ethnic Sampang now speak Chamling.
In Bhojpur there are still a handful of very old speakers of Sampang who are able to recall a form of Sampang which reflects aspects of the language as it was spoken by the very first emigrants that moved into the area. It does, however, show a heavy influence from Bantawa, the dominant Kiranti language in the area, as well as strange semantic shifts typical of a dying language which can be barely remembered.
Sadly, this is precisely what Sampang is in the majority of these enclaves. In other areas, where emigration from the Khotang homeland occurred in the more recent past, the language is still spoken as it is in the homeland. Children of emigrants who spent a considerable part of their childhood in the homeland still speak Sampang as fluently as their peer group in Khotang, but language retention of the young generation born in the Bhojpur enclaves is virtually zero.
In the Sampang homeland in Khotang, the Sampang language is still being used, albeit with heavy Nepali influence. Word classes such as adjectives, nouns and numerals are to a large degree Nepalicised. The last bastions of Sampang appears to be its typically Kiranti verb, characterised by complex pronominalization, and the various aspectual turns it can take when aspectivising verbs are added. Despite the present state of the Sampang language, a few learned shamans and tayami [lit., ‘men of the origins’] still know the old Sampang language as well as old shamanic songs known as risia [Nepali, ‘mundhum’].
Sampang is being investigated by René Huysmans