About the Project

The Newar Online Dictionary, NOD for short, is a multilingual glossary that contains words of the Tibeto-Burman language known as Newar, Nepal Bhasa (नेपाल भाषा) or Nevāḥ 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” (2022-26), 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 difficult to retrieve, in an easily searchable electronic archive and to offer a platform on which to further build the documentation of the constantly expanding world of the Newar word.