In most urban households, many children talk in English these days. While this is mostly attributed to parents making their children watch and listen to English animated movies and nursery rhymes, the Dzongkha Development Commission (DDC) just came up with a Dzongkha version. The Commission for the first time launched 14 Dzongkha nursery rhymes.
This new service according to the commission is a way to improve children’s proficiency and knowledge in Dzongkha from a very early age.
The verses in the Dzongkha nursery rhymes are about Dzongkha Alphabets, Grammar, National Dress and the four seasons among many others. According to the commission, many children know about these topics in English but have less to no knowledge about it in Dzongkha.
“If we ask a few children about our national dress, flowers and trees, they don’t know about it. Forget about this, when we ask about colours, they easily can name the colours in English but they don’t know it in Dzongkha,” said Yumkee Lhamo, the Senior Language Development Officer with the DDC (DZO)
Poor Proficiency in Dzongkha has always been one of the major problems many adult Bhutanese face too.
“These days with changes happening in the country, animated movies and rhymes are all available through the internet. And our children also easily learn their language and culture. Now what we realised is that if we need to develop our own language, we should use these kinds of technique,” she added.
The rhymes will be uploaded on the commission’s YouTube channel. With nursery rhymes, the commission also launched an animated movie Samphel 3, comic books and a Dzongkha Unicode manual which will be available on their website.
Samten Dolkar
