Reliving Tales of Angami Naga

Abstract

Reliving Tales of Angami Naga is a collaborative project between William Liu Rui Qian, a back-end coding developer student from the faculty of Engineering in Information Engineering and Media at Nanyang Technological University, and myself, assuming the role of designer and animator. This project is guided by the SoH, ADM, and EEE teams as part of Professor Joan Marie Kelly and Professor Alexander Robertson Coupe’s eight-year partnership to sustain and support the development of literacy in endangered languages. Of the 170 or so minority languages at risk in India, half are Tibeto-Burman languages primarily spoken in regions such as Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland in North-East India. The impending loss of these languages would be catastrophic, resulting in the loss of cultural heritage and linguistic knowledge. Reliving Tales of Angami is a Pixel Role Playing Game (RPG) designed to promote the Tenyidie language and cultural heritage of the Angami Tribe in Nagaland to a global audience, with a particular focus on younger Angami generations. We heavily rely on Tenyidie folktales as a medium to facilitate the narrative and impart cultural knowledge in the game. We aspire to inspire similar efforts globally towards adopting adaptive and sustainable design approaches for the preservation of language and culture.