Kokborok Language:
The Twipra Student Federation (TSF), a wing of the North East Students Organisation (NESO), staged a protest in Agartala recently, demanding the adoption of the Roman script for the Kokborok language.
- Kokborok is a language of the Borok people, geographically known as Tripuris.
- It is one of the State’s official languages of Tripura, notified on January 19, 1979.
- It is a Sino-Tibetan language and can be traced back to at least the 1st century AD when the historical record of Tripuri kings started to be written down in a book called the Raj Ratnakar.
- So far, the term Kokborok is known to first occur as ‘Kok-boro’ in 1897/98 in an early primer on the language, Daulat Ahmed ‘Kokboroma.
- In 1900, Thakur Radhamohan Debbarma spelt ‘Kokborok’ in a published grammar of the language.
- At the time, various British Political Agents, District Officers, Sub- Division Officers were known as linguists – they called this language Tipperh, Tipura, or Tipra Language.
- The word Kokborok is derived from the word ‘Kok’, meaning ‘verbal’, and ‘Borok’, meaning ‘people’ or ‘human’.
- According to the 2011 Census report, the number of Kokborok-speaking people is 8,80,537, which is 23.97% of the total population of Tripura.
