UBC launches the first free open-access Nepali textbook

The UBC Nepali Language team at the launch of the Introduction to the Nepali Language textbook at Nepal Heritage Day BC on May 30, 2026. From left to right: Binod Shrestha, Dr. Mark Turin, and Salina Dolmo Lama.

Introduction to the Nepali Language is the first free open-access textbook of its kind designed for learners, educators, community groups, and heritage speakers of Nepali.  The book was launched in celebration of BC’s first-ever Nepali Heritage Day on 30 May, 2026, marking an important milestone in expanding opportunities for Nepali language learning and engagement.

Developed within the Faculty of Arts, the textbook was created through a collaboration between faculty, students, and staff. The team included principal investigator Dr. Mark Turin, an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies; Binod Shrestha, an instructor with the Himalaya Program; and Salina Dolmo Lama, a Nepali graduate student at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.

The project also received support from the Open Education Resources (OER) Affordability Grant Program and was enhanced by contributions from the UBC Library’s Scholarly Communications team and open education infrastructure supported by the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT).

We spoke with Dr. Turin and Salina Lama about the journey behind the textbook and what this new resource means for learners in the Himalayan region and the global Nepali diaspora. Erin Fields, Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at the UBC Library, also shared a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative effort and careful work that made the project possible.

What led you to develop this open access textbook? Was there a gap or need you were hoping to address?

Dr. Turin: I have lived and worked in Nepal since the early 1990s, and over the years I have learned, taught, and translated Nepali in a range of professional capacities. I love speaking and teaching Nepali and have long wanted to build a tool like this.

The textbook grew out of a collaboration with Binod Shrestha, whose applied Nepali teaching in Nepal and North America spans decades, and Salina Dolmo Lama, whose cultural knowledge and community-informed perspective shaped the resource throughout.

Over the past decade, through the UBC Himalaya Program and Binod Shrestha’s intensive summer Nepali teaching, we have become increasingly aware of a real absence. Nepali language is central to Nepal, to Himalayan studies, and to a fast-growing global diaspora across the Gulf, East and Southeast Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia. Yet rigorous, accessible, open introductory materials for university and community learners remain surprisingly scarce.

We wanted to create a structured, multimedia resource that meets those learners where they are: one that begins with Devanāgarī — the script used to write Nepali and several other South Asian languages — and pronunciation, and then builds speaking, listening, reading, writing, grammar, and cultural understanding together, in a single, freely accessible place.

Today’s learners are diverse. They include heritage speakers and diaspora families, community schools and weekend classes, independent and online learners. Many are second-generation Nepalis who understand the language but do not speak it confidently, or who speak it but cannot read Devanāgarī. For them, Nepali is not a foreign language at all, but one of ancestry, family, and belonging — something to reclaim rather than acquire from the outside. My essay “Who Learns Nepali Now?” in The Commons might give a more comprehensive idea on this.

How does this project fit into your other work, especially in connection with communities in the Himalayan region and the Pacific Northwest?

Dr. Turin: It gives us a model. The project shows that community-engaged language work can be serious scholarship, a form of public humanities, and public pedagogy at once. And it strengthens UBC’s role as a bridge between campus-based teaching and the wider Himalayan and Nepali communities of British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, and beyond.

It also gives us practical experience — with open platforms, accessibility standards, audio-supported learning, and the practice of responsive and iterative revision — that can inform future work with Tibetan and other Himalayan languages, and that resonates with the collaborative, community-led language projects we are involved in with Indigenous partners here in this region.

Perhaps most importantly, it helps make language work visible. Languages do not sustain themselves on goodwill alone — they need materials, platforms, teachers, and institutions willing to invest for the long term.

Why was it important that this resource be freely available, and what do you hope learners take away beyond language skills?

Dr. Turin: A free, open resource can move around and be shared more easily — through community schools, family networks, university classes, study groups, and diaspora organisations. And because it is open, it is not finished in the way a printed textbook is. Language learning is never really complete; it is recursive, social, and situated. So we have built something that can be revised, corrected, and expanded as learners and teachers tell us what actually works. A living resource like this reflects how language is genuinely learned far better than a closed one.

Binod Shrestha and Salina Dolmo Lama audio recording at UBC Studios on February 20, 2026.

Binod Shrestha presenting the resource at the Nepali Heritage Day BC event.

UBC Himalaya team with Premier David Eby, MLA for Surrey-Fleetwood Jagrup Brar, and President of Nepal Cultural Society of BC, Raju Bhattarai.

What was your role and how did you contribute to the creation of this textbook?

Salina D. Lama: In the first phase of the project, I supported the development and review of the resource content, contributed cultural and linguistic perspectives, and helped ensure the material was accurate, accessible, and relevant for today’s learners. I also recorded the female voice for the dialogue-based learning content.

Now that the resource is published and was launched at BC’s first Nepali Heritage Day, my role has shifted to outreach — raising awareness among community organizations, educators, and academic repositories, and gathering feedback from learners so the resource keeps improving over time.

Did anything about this project surprise you? Was there anything that was particularly challenging?

Salina D. Lama: One of the most surprising parts of this project was working with Pressbooks and realizing how much flexibility it offers for creating learning materials. I did not expect the platform to be so dynamic in terms of design, structure, and how content can be presented, especially while working with Devanāgarī script. That made me think differently about how digital tools can support education, especially at a  time when language learning is being shaped by  emerging technology and interactive platforms. It also made the process feel more creative than I initially expected, because there was room to think about how learners would experience the material, not just what content needed to be included.

One of the main challenges was thinking carefully about accessibility for learners of different abilities and at different levels. Language learning is never a single-track process, and it became important to make sure that the material could support all kinds of learners in a meaningful way.

How does this experience fit into your broader career aspirations, or your research work?

Salina D. Lama: This project has encouraged me to think more deeply about knowledge equity and who gets to participate in education and digital knowledge systems. One aspect that stood out for me was working in a team where none of us had Nepali as our only or first language, but where all of us still had strong connections to it in different ways. That mix shaped a collaborative process drawing on different experiences and approaches to the language. More importantly, bringing those different relationships to  language into the same space helped us create something thoughtful and accountable.

At the same time, my own background in a multilingual environment, including speaking Tamang as my mother tongue alongside Nepali, has shaped how I understand language as something closely tied to identity, visibility, and belonging. In Nepal and in diaspora contexts, language often carries different levels of recognition and presence in formal education and public spaces. This has made me more curious about how language shapes  those experiences, particularly for Indigenous and minority communities from Nepal who speak their own mother tongues alongside Nepali as the national language, and in diasporic settings where they navigate English as a dominant language—sometimes as a first language for second- or third-generation families.

What role did the UBC Library play in bringing this open-access Nepali language textbook to publication?

Erin Fields: We assisted with developing the style and structure of the book—including developing a style guide and creating custom coding—to make sure it was standardized and visually-flowed for the users. We also provided guidance on copyright and licensing, developed metadata, and created a discovery and dissemination plan to make the textbook widely accessible through open education networks, repositories, and language-learning communities.

Before publication, we conducted a technical review and final clean-up, transitioned the book to its permanent URL, and registered its DOI through Datacite. Throughout the project, we provided training, answered questions as they arose, and met regularly with the project team to ensure we were working toward shared goals.

Sohana Manzoor is a Communications and Storytelling Assistant with the Faculty of Arts Communications team. She is currently completing her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at UBC.