India, Feb. 14 -- Mingkeng Lego is crouched over a laptop, a pen in hand and a scattering of books and diaries by his side. The spines of hardbacks and paperbacks are worn, the pages littered with annotations. The hills outside the room are visible through the window - his room is nestled in the lush expanses of Roing in Arunachal Pradesh. The 21-year-old is poring over each volume, carefully translating to English the words from Tani - a family of dialects that shares its name with an umbrella term for the state's five major tribes.

Lego and 33 others, as members of the Tani Language Foundation (TLF), are working overtime and against a raft of challenges to keep the centuries-old languages from flickering away.

The foundation started o...