Record your grandparents speaking Thakali.
You record your grandparents in three passes — their stories, then everyday sentences, then single words. The last two are asked for deliberately and repeated twice, which is what turns them into something you can actually study.
Works on your phone. No account, no sign-up. Recordings are saved on your device straight away.
The three passes
They do different jobs, and the order matters — a story loosens people up far better than a word list, and someone who has just been talking freely gives you better words afterwards.
Stories
You ask, they talk. The salt-caravan route, Lha Phewa, what their grandmother cooked. Long unbroken answers — the richest Thakali you will ever capture.
This is the archive. It is not turned into flashcards: the words are buried inside sentences, so it is for keeping, not drilling. 2Sentences
You read an everyday sentence aloud in Nepali — "आउनुहोस्, बस्नुहोस्" — and ask them to say it in Thakali. Twice: once normally, once slowly.
Becomes listening practice — you repeat after them → 3Words
One word at a time, said twice with a gap. 107 of them: kinship, body, numbers, food, house, land, animals, verbs.
Becomes your flashcards →Why ask for them twice? Because a recording has to be the answer, not merely contain one. If you only ask "what do you call mother?" inside a conversation, what you capture is four seconds of Nepali framing with the Thakali word somewhere in the middle — priceless as a record, useless as a flashcard, and there is no speech recogniser on earth that will dig it out for a language with 4,200 speakers.
Asking for the word directly, repeated, costs the same effort and produces something you can study the next morning — with no transcription and no linguist.
Before your first sitting
Let it run. Start with the story questions, not the word list. The vocabulary that comes out of a story is the richest material you will get, and the pauses are worth keeping.
Never supply the word yourself. If they cannot recall one, move on and come back. A word you prompted only proves they are being polite.
Note the village. Tukuche, Marpha and Syang Thakali differ enough that speakers do not fully understand each other. Two different answers to one question are usually two correct answers.
Ask the salt-trade questions early. That trade ended when the border closed in 1959. The words for the loads, the measures and the camps on the route exist now only in your oldest relatives — and in no dictionary anywhere.
Why this is urgent
Thakali is definitely endangered. The generation raising children is largely not passing it on, so the people who speak it best are the oldest people in your family. There is no Duolingo for a language with 4,200 speakers, and there never will be. Their voices are the only teaching material that will ever exist.
The one rule: nothing is invented
A word appears in the dictionary only because a named person said it on a recording, or because a citable published source recorded it. Where a word is unknown, it stays missing — which is why the dictionary starts empty.
That rule matters more here than for a big language. If this archive guesses, the guess has nothing to be corrected against, and a confident invention in the dictionary of a dying language outlives everyone who could have caught it.
About the language itself
Thakali (ths) belongs to the Tamangic group of Sino-Tibetan — its close
relatives are Gurung, Tamang, Chantyal and Manange, not Nepali, which is Indo-Aryan.
Speakers' own name for it is reported as təmaŋ kəi, which is not the
Tamang language. It is spoken in Thak Khola, the Kali Gandaki valley, between Tatopani
and Jomsom, and is written in Devanagari today after historically using Tibetan script.
It has a sound system Nepali does not: a retroflex series, and a breathy (murmured) contrast running through stops, affricates, fricatives, trills and laterals — six vowels each with a murmured counterpart. This is why audio matters more than spelling: a distinction Nepali speakers cannot hear is one Devanagari does not reliably write.
Sources: UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger; Ethnologue (ths); Regmi, Segmental phonological properties in Thakali; Turin, Too Many Stars and Not Enough Sky; Hari, A vocabulary of the Thakali language (SIL, 1971). Census figures 2011–2021, retrieved Nov 2026.
Where the recordings are kept
Every recording is saved on your device the moment you stop recording, and stays there. You can download them at any time. Optionally you can connect a device once so recordings also copy to the family archive — that is the backup, so a lost phone cannot cost you a recording.