Well-known linguist Professor Dr George van Driem has said that the Limbu language is the most ancient language among the Tibeto-Burman languages.
Van Driem, who wrote A Grammar of Limbu in 1987, said so during an interview with Nepalkhabar.
“The Limbu language is the most ancient language among Tibeto-Burman languages based on the morphology of its verbs,” said van Driem, “Hence, it is the most interesting language to study.”
Limbu, Gurung, Magar, Tamang, Rai (Dumi, Lohorung) are in the Tibeto-Burman language family. The Tibeto-Burman language family encompasses many languages spoken in the heartland of Asia.
During the interview, van Dream shared that he is working on publishing the second edition of A Grammar of Limbu with the financial support of Swiss government.
Sharing his past experience how he happed to come to Nepal to study the Limbu language, van Driem said, while he was studying at a university, his teachers advised him to go to Nepal and study Limbu language assuming that it was the most ancient language. “Now, my assumption has been proven,” said van Driem.
He has also studied other Kirant languages in Nepal, such as Dumi, Lohorung.
When asked about the future of the languages, van Driem said some languages will die down. "Lohorung language is dying in the near future but Limbu language will not die," said he.
Born in 1957, van Driem is a Dutch linguist associated with the University of Bern, where he was the chair of Historical Linguistics and directed the Linguistics Institute. He became professor emeritus in 2022.
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