A Nepali-English Dictionary: The Gift of Language

Hall: I had asked a lot of ex-Peace Corps friends of mine about the dictionaries they had. The idea was to get normal conversational English into the dictionary and in the past, those dictionaries in Nepali have tended to be for trekkers and hikers in Nepal, not Nepali speakers in the United States. And they sent me altogether 13 different dictionaries.

I reviewed them all and selected the one that seemed to be the best and it turned out that the author of that was a professor at the University of Texas in Nepali. I contacted him. We met a couple of weeks later because his daughter happened to be in Vermont and we met and we agreed that we would revise and update the dictionary and get it published.

Greenberg: Have you seen these dictionaries make a difference?

Hall: Yes. One 13-year-old girl takes it to school with her every day. It’s in her backpack and when they’re doing reading and she comes across a word in the English text that she doesn’t understand, she can look it up.

Greenberg: Have you heard back from any of the school teachers about them using them?

Hall: Yes. In Boscawen, I udnerstand the fourth grade teacher there had used the dictionary in that classroom not only for the Bhutanese child, but for the other kids in the class to learn a few words of Nepali that they could use in the class, welcome and thank you and things like that.

Greenberg: So eventually, you hope to see these dictionaries used all around the country, wherever there are Bhutanese refugees settling.

Hall: Yes, what I’d like to see, but we can’t do yet, is when a refugee family comes in, the local agency provides them with a bed, with one lamp, with sheets and towels, with cooking pots and pans and I’d like to see them provide one dictionary as just a standard part of what a refugee family gets when they arrive in the U-S.
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That was Doug Hall talking to Jon Greenberg. So far, Hall has raised and borrowed money to print 500 copies of his dictionary. His plan is to find sponsors for each one, at 15 dollars apiece. That money in turn will allow him to pay off the loan and print more copies. He has requests from over a hundred local groups around the country who are also helping resettle Bhutanese in their communities.