THE NATION: HISTORIAN TRIES TO SAVE LANGUAGE

March 15, 2000

Once a master race, the Mon people now have no country

and are desperately trying to save their language with

help from a Rangoon historian, writes

 

Peter Janssen of the Deutsche Presse-Agentur:

 

RANGOON - When the Mon New State Party agreed to end 48

years of armed insurgency against the central Burmese

military regime in June 1996, the Mon people notched up

yet another defeat in their long history of losses.

 

Over the past five centuries the Mon have arguably lost

two countries - Burma and Thailand.

 

Believed to be the first settlers in the agriculturally

rich central plains of Burma and Thailand, the modern Mon

are now a people without a country, and pretty soon they

may lose their language as well.

 

Rangoon-based Mon historian Nai Pan Hla, 76, is

struggling to stop his mother tongue from joining the

growing list of dead languages.

 

"Some people say I'm a madman," said Nai Pan Hla. "But I

don't want my language to disappear in my lifetime."

Since returning to Burma in 1998 from a 10-year

professorship in Japan, Nai Pan Hla has been teaching

ancient and modern Mon script and literature to 45 senior

academics in Rangoon and has 62 high school pupils in

Moulmein, now the main city in the Mon State of Burma.

 

"I think Mon will be a dead language within 40 years," he

said. "Everywhere in the world the minority language is

swallowed by the majority one."

 

The looming demise of the Mon language in Burma threatens

to further erase the cultural contribution of one o he

once-most powerful and widespread civilisations in

mainland Southeast Asia.

 

The Mon, part of the Tibetan-Khmer ethnic group believed

to have originated in the Yangzi River Valley of China,

were the first known inhabitants of the central plains

and sojuthern coastlines of modern-day Burma and

Thailand.

 

They became the dominant Khmer people in Cambodia, whose

modern language is similar, but incomprehensible to

Burmese-Mon.

 

Mon founded Burma's capital Rangoon, originally called

Dagon. Mon Buddhists built the spectacular Shwe Dagaon

pagoda, a towering structure, standing 99 metres high on

a hill overlooking the capital, originally calling it

"Kyaik Dagon" in Mon, ro "Dagon Pagoda".

 

Dagon itself is a Mon word meaning "three hillocks",

describing the city's three distinctive peaks.

 

In Thailand, the Mon were the first known settlers in the

central plains, before being slowly assimilated by the

southern migration of the ethnic Thais.

 

"The population of Ayutthaya, Thailand's old capital, was

half Mon and half Thai," said Nai Pan Hla, an ethnic Mon

himself who spent 40 years working for the Archaeological

Department of Burma's Ministry of Culture.

 

Many prominent Thais still claim Mon heritage, among them

former Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun, whose ancestor

was a governor of Martaban in Burma, a city which no

longer exists.

 

While the Thais assimilated the Mon peacefully, their

fall from power in Burma was a bloody one.

 

In the 16th century, Pagan's King Tabin Shwe-ti, the

second Burmese monarch to unite the country's plethora of

ethnic minorities under single rule, conquered the Mon

cities of Pegu, Martaban and Prome.

 

His campaign was a brutal one according to historical

accounts.

 

Fernao Mendes Pinto, the famous Portuguese adventurer who

was in Myanmar in 1542 during the sacking of Prome, gave

this lurid eye-witness accunt:

 

"The inhumanities committed were beyong imagination. The

King ordered all the dead children that lay up and down

the streets to be brought, and causing them to be hacked

very small, he gave them mixed with bran, rice and herbs

to his war elephants to eat."

 

Despite their wars against the Mon, the Burmese people

obviously shared much in common with the Mon. In Pagan,

the traditional seat of power for the Burmese ethnic

group, ancient Mon script was used for Royal edicts and

temple inscriptions up until the 12th century.

 

Burmese kings only started to use their own script in

1113, when King Anawrahta came to power.

 

The early Burmese also used Pyu script, a Burmese

language that is now extinct, as are the Pyu people as a

distinct ethnic minority.

 

Burma's military junta claims there are eight major races

today in their country and some 135 different ethnic

groups, making a racial melting pot they often use to

excuse their heavy-handed grip on power.

 

"In fact there is only one real race in Burma, the Asian

race," said Nai Pan Hla. "What distinguishes the ethnic

groups are their different languages and dialects, and

their cultures."

 

Some ethnic minorities in Burma have managed to preserve

their language and culture by openly opposing all things

Burmese in their traditional territories.

 

Not so the Mon. "The Mon State is in name only. If you

visit the 10 cities in the Mon State in Burma you will

not hear anyone speaking Mon," complained Professor Nai

Pan Hla.

 

"The Mon mix easily with the Burmese people. The other

ethnic groups, like the Kachin, Karen and Shan, can keep

their languages because they don't mix with the Burmese,

but they will all eventually be assimilated as well," he

predicted.