Raji (Banraji/Raji/Banmanus/Banrawat/Rajbaar) ISO 639-3 code jnl is a little-known tribal community inhabiting the eleven small hamlets in the state of Uttarakhand, the hill base region of the west-central Himalayas, India. Beyond the shores of India, Raji is spoken much more in Nepal. In fact, UNESCO Interactive Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger and Ethnologue categorized Raji as a language spoken in Nepal.

Raji is facing all the problems that any endangered language does: a very low socio-economic status, very few speakers, code-reduction, diminishing language attitude, etc. But as it usually happens, the causal factors of language endangerment are mostly non-linguistic, and largely, socio-politico-economic. SEL President has been trying hard since last many years to revitalize the language. She had prepared grammar, developed an orthography with the community and prepared an Alphabet Reader for the children in addition to compiling a trilingual dictionary. Thus, the first phase of revitalization effort has been completed.

In 2017, SEL conducted another field trip again to assess the results of the revitalization program. On the basis of the received data, we chalked out the second stage of the program called Raji Revitalization Program Phase II . Following are the objectives of this program:

• Script re-introduction workshops
• Jewellery making workshops
• Creation of new narratives
• Bowl carving workshops
• Raji language teaching in Chakarpur hamlet

We have conducted the first three workshops and plan to conduct more in the future. The following team is handling the project-