Warning: This is a sensitive article. Reader discretion required!

What comes in your mind when you hear the word language? Something that you use for communication? Well in Assam, language is politics and nothing else but politics. And Tai language (or more like Tai label) unfortunately has become a tool for identity politics of some Assamese leaders with inferiority complex and their construction of a neo Tai-Ahom identity has infact implied construction of a pseudo Tai language whose purpose is only politics and propaganda. Khuptang! Chu mu ka sang? Chu kao puja gogoi. If you say this to an actual Tai speaker he will be puzzled and wonder are you even saying, but this is what is being called as 'Tai' or particularly 'Ahom' language in Assam. Or atleast by the propagandists who despite being humiliated by BJ Terwiel still haven't left behind their wicked ways and promote pseudo-Ahom words for everyday usage

Who cares if 'Tai' is an actual living language, and is actually the identity of the tribes like Khamyang, Aiton, Aiton, Phake who have been calling themselves Tai long before these Ahom leaders even knew what is Tai. There shall be no mercy in hijacking this minority identity, because some people want ST-status and minority benefits, while also having no sympathy for the actual minorities and actual tribes whose languages have been endangered and even become extinct cause of their hegemony.

Identity Invasion

I don't want to make it a victimization article especially since I am not the victim here, but when a huge population of people suddenly start calling themselves a certain thing (which is not in fact who they are) then it leads to a cultural anxiety. Assamese people might sympathise when a lot of non-Assamese people living in Assam identify as Assamese even though they don't even speak Assamese at home or celebrate Bihu. They just want that label Assamese, maybe because it sounds good to them or maybe because they want to loot the tourists that come to this region while pretending to be a native. There are lots of different reasons, sometimes it is just inferiority complex.

Similarly a lot of people who don't even celebrate Poi Pee Mau Tai or don't know even basic things about Tai culture or can speak even basic Tai language when they call themselves Tai, that too leads to dare I say an identity invasion or in more simple words hijacking of an identity which is very different from claiming or reclaiming an identity. And Pseudo Ahom projects by Pathsaku, Moran Tai Institue, Tai Sahitya Sabha, etc are all a path to hijacking this identity. And worse they even get paid for it and in crores !

Tonal to Toneless language

Tai is a tonal language, meaning kón means a person but kōn means a butt, kài means a chicken but kái is a taboo-word for male-organ. kón tái means Tai people, while kón taai means dead people and unless you have prior experience with Chinese, just listening these words on loop will mess your mind. But you only really need tones if you want to speak a language, if you only want to do propaganda and fool other people then you can completely remove tones and that's exactly what Pathsaku Moran Tai Institute and their gang have done. For decades they have looted crores of funds in the name of Assam Accord, established institutions in name of Tai precisely to steal money but even after spending literally decades in Ahom Revivalism none of these propagandists can even speak one word of Tai properly as is proven from the pseudo-ahom words that they use which I consider a litmus test, where even without interviewing a person personally you can tell if they can speak Tai or not.

Propaganda vs Education

Now personally speaking, I am quite interested in Ahom Revivalism, not as a propaganda movement like lot of its opponents have claimed it to be but as an actual education movement making it as easy as possible for someone even of indo-aryan heritage to learn Tai, despite the huge differences in both language families. Now if we trace the movement then the first Ahom organization, with the goal of reviving Ahom language was started in 1880-1890s (ref. Saikia 2004) around same time as Hebrew language revivalism but while in a few decades Hebrew got literally millions of native speakers, from absolute zero. But even after hundred years there is not a single Ahom family that can speak Tai, and worse even the ones who have Khamti mothers, Phake mothers, Aiton mothers, they too can't speak even one word of their mother-tongue (u see what i did there). So those who do propaganda in the name of Ahom should have this basic amount of shame and accountability that not only you lost your own language but you were also an accomplice and catalyst for other tribes losing their language, and that too assuming if these people are very sure about their family history.

My conclusion has been that most so-called Ahom people are interested in kanging and not learning, weaponising history to show superiority over other tribes and even their interest in Dai language is just enough that people do not insult them. Between learning Tai and convincing other people that you know Tai or that there are some Ahoms who speak Tai daily, they will always chose the second option which is normal because human beings always make comfortalbe choices. Learning a language takes thousands of hours while kanging and lying takes minutes. But you are only really lying to yourself and no one else ! And that is what I call a pseudo-Ahom behaviour.

Pseudo Ahom vs Dai Ahom

Pseudo-Ahom is a fake language invented by thugs to loot government funds and claim minority benefits to build an entire ecosystem based on fakery. It's a local business-model in simple words but a very very mediocre one and also powered by equally mediocre and naive people. Diploma Courses as sold in as expensive as 9000 and with the stamp of as reputed varsities as Dibrugarh University and government hasn't even done basic background check to even check if these people can even speak one word of Tai, whose courses and books they are promoting with public funds. Some so-called 'Tai Songs' are made in a language that no Tai speaker can understand, but add the stamp of 'traditional Ahom Song' and fool the naïve people who have themselves never heard an actual Tai song

Dai Ahom is the exact opposite. It accepts that Ahom is merely a Bengali or Eastern-IA corruption of the word Shan (ref. this article), and accepts position of Old Ahom or Manuscript Ahom as an ancient Shan dialect while Dai Ahom as a modern Shan dialect. It also simplifies pronouns and classifiers, and shifting certain vowels for easier pronounciation (long>lung, kón>kún, etc) while keeping the grammar intact and most importantly maintains an equilibrium between not changing the script so much so that you can no longer even read old Manuscripts and at the same time making just enough changes to be able to cross-communicate with other Tai groups and fulfiling the most basic purpose of a language - self-expression and communication ! For more detailed information, check the article how to revive Ahom language with its own ISO code and locale. So that someday we might have google translate and google keyboard for Dai Ahom !

Why Dai Ahom slaps

Now I can't really say why this is better than this without really showing examples and solid reason why. And the thing with pseudo-Ahom is that it is unreadable, since it is a neo-constructed language for propaganda you can't do anything with it except propaganda and not make anything that people can actually read and understand what you have written. Dai Ahom perfectly fulfils this basic self-expression task. And Dai Ahom, precisely because of its monosyllabic nature is the perfect language for song-writing (see examples like this and this). Aside from it you can also use it for other media works like writing poems, quotes, dubbing anime songs, or even maintaining a simple diary that no one can read (unless they know Tai), the benefits of Dai Ahom are immense.

Now if you are interested about this project I want to give you update that it's halted and not a single page has been made for months. We are running in backlogs with past events and preparation for future events along with our own personal life to seriously invest time for Ahom Manga. And it is not like the so-called Ahom community or people of Assam support art or artists in anyway so this project is indefinitely halted unless we become big and have enough money to self fund everything (I doubt we will have the enthusiasm then tho). For the record I still haven't paid the artist for this work

And that's all there is to it.