"The Bunan speaking community in Lahaul is still co-hesive and most parents still raise their children in the Gahr Valley, where they grow up speaking Bunan." (p.22)

"Since the opening of the road over the Rohtang La in 1965, an increasing number of Bunan families have permanently migrated to Kullu Valley. Their descendants often speak Hindi as a primary language and only have an imperfect command of the language of their parents. Fortunately, such cases are rather exceptional. Bunan as a spoken language is thus not immediately threatened at present. The Bunan speaking community in Lahaul is still co-hesive and most parents still raise their children in the Gahr Valley, where they grow up speaking Bunan. Still, the rapid social and economic changes that are currently taking place in India are a challenge for both the traditional culture and the language of the Bunan speak-ing community (and for the cultural and linguistic diversity of South Asia in general). In the future, the steady emigration of Bunan speakers to other areas inside and outside of Hima-chal Pradesh combined with the increasing immigration of outsiders may well lead to the destabilization and disintegration of the Bunan speaking community in the foreseeable future. Great efforts will have to be made in order to preserve the cultural and linguistic diversity of Lahaul for future generations. However the indigenous inhabitants of Lahaul are increasingly becoming aware of the uniqueness of their cultural heritage. Manifestations of this growing awareness are publications such as the book Moravian missionaries in western Trans-Himalaya (Dorje & Tobdan 2008), which was authored by indigenous scholars. An ever-growing number of Lahauli music videos on YouTube likewise illustrate this development. I am thus confident that Bunan and the other indigenous languages of Lahaul at least stand a good chance of surviving as spoken languages in the near future. The transformation of modern India may indeed be a challenge for the countless linguistic minorities of India. How-ever, at least in the case of Lahaul, the process is also bringing along increased social awareness of the value of cultural and linguistic diversity, which may prove to be a powerful resource for the indigenous ethnolinguistic societies of Lahaul." (p.22)