Bantawa, spoken in Eastern Nepal, is the most widely used of the Rai languages, an important subgroup of the Kiranti group of Tibeto-Burman languages. This dictionary, based on material obtained in the context of the Linguistic Survey of Nepal, concise though it is, stands out as the most voluminous of the few dictionaries and word lists for Rai languages that were hitherto published with English equivalents of native forms provided. The fact that both a Bantawa-English and an English-Bantawa part give access to the forms makes the book an important research tool for specialists in Kiranti languages as well as for scholars concerned with Tibeto-Burman and Nepal studies in general.
