The Project
The Newar Online Dictionary (NOD), is a multilingual glossary that contains words of the Tibeto-Burman language known as Newar, Nepal Bhasa (नेपाल भाषा) or Nevāh bhāy (नेवाः भाय्), as well as their Newar, English, Nepali, and Italian definitions.
Predominantly spoken and written in and around the Kathmandu
Valley, Nepal, and documented since about the 5th century CE,
Newar boasts of a vast and dramatically understudied literature,
available in Kathmandu Valley archives, that has played a key role
in the transmission and preservation of medieval Buddhism,
Hinduism, as well as of premodern and early modern South Asian
poetry, sciences, and historiography. Regardless of having
experienced a modernist literary renaissance in the early 20th
century and having gained greater visibility with the increased
self-assertion of minorities in Nepal since the beginning of the
21st, with its currently about 850,000 speakers Newar is still
classified as a “definitely endangered language.”
The NOD, being the result of the project “Glossaries for the Gods
and Other Users” (26-2022), supported by the Canadian Social
Sciences and Research Council (SSHRC), based at the University
of Toronto, partnering with the University of Virginia and bringing
together scholars from Canada, Guatemala, Nepal, and the United
States, is designed to assist community members, scholars, and
learners worldwide in translating modern and classical Newar with
the intention of assisting speakers and readers of Newar in further
building their linguistic competence
The NOD’s unique contribution is to assemble an entirely new, comprehensive, and
unified set of entries that make available the lexicographical content of existing
Newar bi- or trilingual word lists, which are scattered across a host of publications
and have been di cult to retrieve, in an easily searchable electronic archive and to
o er a platform on which to further build the documentation of the constantly
expanding world of the Newar word.
Acknowledgment
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
in funding the Newar Online Dictionary project.
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada
