The announcement that Nagaland University, in partnership with the state’s Directorate of School Education, will develop written grammars for the eighteen recognised Naga languages marks a historic moment. For the first time, what has long existed in practice and memory will be codified into structured resources, to be taught in schools from Class 5 to Class 12. It is an achievement worth acknowledging — but it also raises deeper questions about power, preservation, and the everyday strategies by which languages survive.
Grammar is never neutral. To write rules for a language is to make decisions about what counts as correct, which dialect takes precedence, and whose voice gets preserved in the textbook. For communities whose speech traditions have thrived without the rigid scaffolding of written rules, grammar is both a recognition and a narrowing. It legitimises languages in the eyes of the state and the academy, but it also freezes their messy vitality into forms that can be graded and examined. This tension is not an argument against the initiative — it is a reminder that standardisation comes with stakes.
The project is also inseparable from the politics of preservation. Officials and academics point to the alignment with the National Education Policy 2020, which champions mother tongue instruction. That framing matters: it shows how cultural preservation is often folded into national policy goals. Preserving languages through grammars and textbooks is at once a community demand and a state project. The risk is that preservation becomes less about the organic life of a language and more about fulfilling bureaucratic visions of “managed diversity.” Every act of codification, every new grammar chart, is a choice about representation — about who gets to decide what a language is and how it should be taught.
Yet language in Nagaland has never been about charts alone. In practice, survival has always meant improvisation. Young Nagas move fluidly between English, Nagamese, and their mother tongues, not because policy told them to, but because life demanded it. Code-switching in the streets of Dimapur or Kohima is as much a survival strategy as it is a cultural expression. In this reality, grammar projects will have to do more than provide tidy rules — they will need to engage with the multilingual, adaptive ways in which young people actually use language.
That is where the real test lies. Written grammars can provide a foundation for pride, for identity, and for the dignity of seeing one’s language treated as equal to English or Hindi. But they will only succeed if they support the living, shifting practices of communities, rather than dictating them. A grammar that silences dialects or sidelines oral creativity risks becoming an academic exercise detached from daily life. A grammar that recognises fluidity and supports multilingual education, on the other hand, can help languages thrive not just in classrooms, but in the world beyond.
This is why the initiative should be celebrated with both pride and caution. It is a milestone, but not the endpoint. Grammar is power, preservation is political, and survival is improvised. The challenge now is to ensure that these grammars do not become monuments to what once was, but living tools that help Naga languages remain what they have always been — dynamic, adaptive, and deeply woven into the identity of the people who speak them.
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