By Mrinal Talukdar
(A brief note before you begin: this article is intentionally written in English to assess the performance of the new Text-to-Speech tool, AkhorAI — https://aakhor.in.)
Every society has a blind spot. Ours is the Assamese language — glorified, sentimentalised, and ritually celebrated, yet stripped of the functional strength required to survive the 21st century. Assamese today stands in a perilous zone: emotionally rich, digitally poor; heritage-heavy, future-light.
If nothing changes, it will not die loudly. It will fade with dignity — like a museum piece everyone admires but no one uses.
Trapped in the Heritage Comfort Zone
Assamese society clings to its cultural past: the medieval manuscripts, the xasipaat tradition, Sankardeva–Madhavdeva’s legacy, Bihu folklore, and the modern corpus built since 1846. These are priceless, but they have become the only lens through which we view the language. Assamese is increasingly treated as a relic — sacred, beautiful, but functionally irrelevant. Languages decline not when heritage disappears, but when functionality collapses.
The Missing Modern Backbone
Where it truly matters, Assamese is dangerously weak. We entered the digital era 25 years late. Most books remain trapped in non-searchable PDFs. Standardised fonts arrived late, OCR remains inconsistent, and voice-to-text tools are only emerging now.
What we still lack is stark:
- A strong NLP and AI ecosystem
- Searchable digital corpora
- High-grade translation engines
- STEM-ready vocabulary
- Large, open datasets
- Digital-first content that attracts young users
In a world ruled by algorithms, a language that cannot be indexed or processed becomes invisible.
The Middle-Class Shift to English
The Assamese middle class has silently abandoned Assamese for ambition and retained it only for emotion. The child studies in English, the parent encourages English, and professions operate entirely in English. Assamese is now a language of living rooms, not laboratories; of conversations, not careers. This is the same pattern that pushed many global languages towards endangerment.
Love Is Not a Language Policy
Emotion cannot save a language. Usage can.
A living language must thrive in research, administration, technology, higher education, coding, journalism, and commerce. Without these pillars, Assamese risks becoming decorative — admired, praised, and unused.
The Way Forward
Two urgent shifts are essential:
Strengthen Heritage Properly:
Digitise manuscripts, archive folk culture, document dialects — professionally, not ceremonially.
Build Functionality Fearlessly:
Create Assamese OCR, AI datasets, STEM textbooks, translation engines, voice tools, and digital platforms. Make Assamese a language of employment, research, governance, and technology.
The Closing Window
The next decade will determine whether Assamese remains a nostalgic heritage asset or becomes an AI-ready, modern working language. Sentiment may keep it alive in memory. But only functionality will keep it alive in the world.
( Writer is leading the Digitizing Assam project through www.assamarchive.org)