Kusunda

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Kusunda
Spoken in:	Nepal
Region:	Gandaki Zone
Total speakers:	near-extinct
Language family:	language isolate Kusunda
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`to be added`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	`kgg`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

The Kusunda or Ban Raja ("people of the forest") are a tribe of people ethnically related to the Chepang, but unlike the Chepang who dwell in mud houses, the few dozen remaining ethnic Kusundas dwell in the forest.

The Kusundas are followers of Animism, though Hindu overtones may be seen in their religious rituals. According to the 2001 Nepal census, there are a total of 164 ethnic Kusunda of which 160 were Hindus and 4 were Buddhists. To many Nepalis, the Kusundas are sometimes stereotyped as barbaric cannibals, perhaps due to the Chepang's assumption that when a Kusunda come across a Chepang, the former had the intention of killing the latter. This caused the Chepang to avoid the Kusunda.

[edit] Kusunda language

Their language was previously classified as belonging to the Tibeto-Burman family, but it is now considered to be a language isolate and a remnant of languages spoken in the area prior to the influx of Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples.

Watters (2005) reports the discovery of some fluent and young speakers of Kusunda, the study of which have resulted in the conclusion that Kusunda is a language isolate with hypothesized relationships to Nihali as remnants of an Indo-Pacific substratum.