‘Indigenous languages and cultures are surviving, and will continue to survive’: Interview with Juang-language writer Kshetrabasi Juanga

Kshetrabasi Juanga, an educator and speaker of the Juang language spoken by roughly 30,000 people in Odisha, India, is documenting oral traditions, festivals, and survival skills through his YouTube channel, Majang Studio Vlogger, as part of the OpenSpeaks Archives project run with Rising Voices and Global Voices.

The initiative aims to build a citable body of audio-visual material for Indigenous and low-resourced languages across India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, addressing Wikipedia's reliance on written sources in a largely oral tradition. Juanga described recording practices like fire-starting with stones and rainy-season shelter techniques, alongside cultural customs such as mourning signals and unspoken rules around gathered firewood.

Government and institutional efforts — an Odisha multilingual education program, tribal language academy publications, and a national research programme — have touched the language, but Juanga noted that everyday cultural practices remain largely undocumented outside his own efforts.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.