Attitude Among the Mising Speech Community of Assam for Maintenance and Development of the Mising Language in Terms of Bilingualism

Mising tribe is an important speech community of Assam, the meeting ground of various communities and tribes. This community coexists in a limited geographical area along with the different communities and tribes with their unique languages and cultures. They speak Mising language in their households and communicate mostly in Assamese with other people. Therefore, socially the Mising people are bilingual. The community do not have any script or written tradition and although an effort has been going on to write in their language with modified Roman scripts, the literature of the language is yet to reach a developed stage. So the backwardness in terms of literature is restricting the language to spread and establish it as a medium of education in the respective society. Used only as a spoken language Mising has been included in the UNESCO endangered language category in its report (2011) and it has become almost certain that the practical field of this language will get shrink within a short period. So in such a crucial linguistic situation it has become an important matter of discussion from the socio-linguistic perspective how an integrated language planning is the need of the hour for maintenance and development of the Mising language. In this case it is very important to have a conscious and positive perspective of the respective Mising language speakers towards maintenance and development of the language. This study covers the perspective of the Mising community towards maintenance and development of their language. Respective people’s standpoint towards choosing another language for communication is also observed. Moreover, in the perspectives of language situation in Assam, it also discusses the real scenario of bilingual situation of the Mising speech community. Information is collected through the methods like field observation, questionnaire and stratified and purposive sample survey method. The subjects have been formatted on the basis of quantitative perception and analysed with SPSS software and Descriptive Statistical method. As per study it is decided that majority of the Mising population has shown positive perspective towards maintenance of the language which can be very helpful in near future. The people of the Mising community should also put effort on regular basis to enrich their language and literature as well.