 Namaste, hello and thanks for coming to see us at SOAS. The purpose of this short video is to give you a little taste of the Nepali language and, if you already know some Nepali, some words for talking about the pandemic that is affecting all of us these days. Nepali is one of a number of languages taught at SOAS that are not available for credit or as part of a degree anywhere else in the UK university system. As with all of our languages, modules in Nepali can be taken as options in just about every SOAS degree course, whether undergraduate or postgraduate. My name is Michael Hutt and I am Professor of Nepali and Himalayan Studies at SOAS. Now, note those pronunciations. Don't you mean Nepali, people sometimes say? Don't you mean Himalayan? No, I reply, it's Nepal, not Nepal and Himalayan, not Himalayan. Anyway, I often say, as the only British academic with these words and his job title, I reserve the right to be pedantic about them. After all, these words have meanings. Well, okay, the origins of the name Nepal are disputed, but Himalaya definitely comes from the Sanskrit, the alia, the home of Himma, snow. Once you know that, you simply have to pronounce it correctly. Nepali also has several other words that are formed in the same way. Pustakalya, the home, the alia, of Pustak. Pustak is a posh Sanskrit word for a book. So, a Pustakalya is a library. Or Bidyalya, the home, the alia, of Bidya, learning. So, a Bidyalya is a school. Nepali is an Indo-Aryan language and it's closely related to Hindi, Bangala and the other languages of North India. It inherits a lot of its vocabulary and grammar from Sanskrit, just as Italian, for instance, inherits lots of its vocabulary from Latin. But it also draws in words from languages like Arabic, Persian and increasingly these days, English. Now Nepal and the Himalaya more generally are the home of an incredible variety of different languages. But Nepali is the mother tongue of about half of Nepal's 30 million people and probably two thirds of the remainder speak it fluently as their second language. Like all languages, Nepali has a range of different registers. At one end of the scale is the pompous impersonal language of the bureaucracy and the newspaper editorial, long complex sentences full of big Sanskrit words. Now the other end is the language of informal conversation, which is much more accessible. And Nepali speakers will always heap praise on Bidishis on foreigners who make the effort to learn even a little of their language. For the past three years I've been leading a big research project funded by the UK government's Global Challenges Research Fund on the social, political and cultural impacts of the devastating earthquakes that hit Nepal in 2015 just five years ago. I've come to realise that all disasters have political, cultural and social dimensions and consequences as well as material ones. Some of my work has focused on the ways in which the earthquake was framed by the Nepali and international news media and constructed and represented in Nepali poetry and song. There is of course a key difference between the 2015 earthquakes and the looming Covid-19 earthquake. The main quake was over in less than a minute five years ago, after which those who had survived it were left to pick up the pieces and begin to make sense of them. On the other hand the pandemic will proceed over weeks and months and its framing and the response to it will evolve. Nepal has been fortunate so far in that as of today, on 21st April, only 31 cases of Covid-19 have been diagnosed within the country. However the Nepal government isn't taking any risks. International flights to Nepal were suspended on 22nd March, Nepal's borders were closed on the same day, denying entry even to Nepali nationals and on 24th March the Nepal government imposed a nationwide lockdown. The word lockdown is now firmly entrenched in the lexicon of the Nepali language. What you will see and hear next is a short dialogue in Nepali that my colleague Krishna Pradhan and I have composed about how to protect oneself from the coronavirus in Kathmandu. After this I will take you through the vocabulary used in this dialogue and explain just a few simple grammatical rules. The one thing that you will find it useful to know before we start is that Nepali is what we call a subject, object, verb language. For example if we say I eat rice in English, in Nepali I say ma baat kanchu, I rice eat. For now surakchit rasvastirhanus, please stay safe and well. We look forward to welcoming you to sow us one day to study one of our precious languages on the other side of the lockdown, whenever that may be. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste Krishna Ji. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste Krishna Ji. Namaste Michael Ji. Namaste to everybody else. Thank you. Goodbye. Once again, Danyavad, thank you for visiting us and for your interest in our languages. This is the end of the first part of this little Nepali taster class. In a separate video, a second video, I will take you through the vocabulary and the basic grammar of the dialogue you just watched and listened to so that you can begin to get an idea of the way in which the Nepali language actually works. So we hope to see you there. Thank you. Bye-bye.