The place of articulation for the Assamese fricative consonant represented by the consonant letters শ, ষ, and স has been a subject of debate for a long time. Linguists from the last and the present centuries have expressed varying attitudes regarding the nature of this fricative sound. Although the prevailing stance among linguists of today aligns with the perspectives of the pioneering linguists of the Assamese language, a small contingent of linguists holds an alternative standpoint; and no consensus has been established thus far. The controversial nature of this particular phoneme is likewise reflected within the Kamrupi dialect as well. Aligned with Standard Assamese, many linguists opine that in the Kamrupi dialect also this fricative phoneme has a velar place of articulation. This paper, however, argues that this phoneme in Southern Kamrupi Assamese is pre-pharyngeal as far as its place of articulation is concerned. Additionally, Southern Kamrupi features the velar fricative [x] as well, which occurs as an allophone of /ħ/. Furthermore, the phoneme /kʰ/ in Southern Kamrupi is realized as [x] in some environments. Since both /ħ/ and /kʰ/ are realized as [x] in certain contexts, therefore, it can be argued that this situation in Southern Kamrupi exemplifies the linguistic phenomenon known as phonological neutralization. This phenomenon is observed in the other two varieties of the Kamrupi Dialect as well, i.e. Nalbaria and Barpetia, and this study takes it into account to offer a broader perspective on its occurrence.
Oral tradition serves as a vital medium for transmitting wisdom, values, and collective memory across generations. Among the Lainong people of northwestern Myanmar, Kaīvi and Kaīvi Yuīnyiū represent distinctive oral genres that embody cultural knowledge, ritual practice, and poetic expression. This study investigates these traditions through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lahe, Myanmar, where the Kaīvi festival continues to be celebrated. Employing a descriptive qualitative approach, the research integrates semi-structured questionnaires, in-depth interviews, document analysis, and autoethnographic reflection. Findings reveal that Lainong speakers demonstrate a strong commitment to preserving Kaīvi and Kaīvi Yuīnyiū despite the sociopolitical and urban pressures threatening their survival. The narrative-poetic form of these songs, composed in an archaic register of the Lainong language, encodes communal values and lived experiences through rich metaphorical language. This study contributes to anthropological linguistics by highlighting how oral traditions function as vehicles of identity and resilience within an endangered linguistic community.
This study explores the basic grammar of Mönkha (Black Mountain language) based on the variety spoken in the Jangbi village, Trongsa, Central Bhutan. Because of its unique lexical and grammatical features, it was referred to as of the three gems of Bhutan after the investigations of the first Linguistic Survey of Bhutan conducted by George van Driem and the Dzongkha Development Commission in the years 1990-1991. The translation of Mönkha examples into Dzongkha is intended for the convenience of Bhutanese and Tibetan readers, and to facilitate the comparative study of Dzongkha and Mönkha.
A pronominal dual formative derivable from *tsi, *ntsi, or *tsiŋ is attested sufficiently broadly across the Tibeto-Burman languages to require that these be reconstructed to the proto-language. In most of these languages only one of these forms occurs, and combines with pronouns to form compositional duals. However, several languages show clear association of *tsi with inclusive dual, and *ntsi with second person dual; there is also some evidence for an originally exclusive value of *tsiŋ. This paper presents the comparative evidence for these, with evidence from various clades supporting the reconstructed person values of the three forms, and suggests a preliminary account of the develoments which have resulted in the replacement in most languages of the original 3-term paradigm with compositional forms.
This article is a sketch of the Sampang language, an underdocumented Kiranti language of the Central-Eastern branch. It is the first published work to cover all aspects of grammar, including phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon.
This article re-examines a 2005-2006 school-based survey of language use across Sikkim, a multilingual Himalayan state in northeastern India. 16,527 students in classes VIII–XII from 105 schools answered questions about languages used with grandparents, parents, and siblings, and which they considered to be their “mother tongue”. Two patterns emerge from our reanalysis. Heritage languages are still used with elders, showing family-based maintenance. Yet everyday conversations among younger people increasingly shift to other languages—often those used in school and public life—especially in conversations between siblings. About one in nine parent pairs (11.24%) no longer use any of their parents’ languages, and about one in eight sibling groups (12.97%) use none of their parents’ languages. The “mother tongue” that students officially reported through the survey often differs from what they speak, highlighting a gap between linguistic identity and language practice. There are also regional variations: North Sikkim shows the strongest continuity; East and South show faster language shift; and the West sits somewhere between. Although school-based sampling and simple matching limit what we can deduce about language use, the directionality of language shift is clear: even though the parent generation know the languages of the grandparent generation and use them to communicate across the two generations, in many cases, they use other language(s) to communicate within their own generation. This is a significant finding, and the same pattern continues to the next generation. Going forward, we recommend strengthening vernacular teaching, expanding spaces for heritage languages, and repeating this survey each decade to track change across schools and communities, as well as to inform language policy.
A Grammar of Malimasa with Annotated Texts and Glossary (玛丽玛萨话语法研究及标注文本) By Zihe Li (李子鹤) Beijing: Peking University Press (北京大学出版社) 2024 Peking University Chinese Linguistics Research Series (“北大中国语言学研究丛书”) ISBN 978-7-301-34862-8 xvii + 419 pages Reviewed by Alexis Michaud
This article describes the various usages of a little known past tense morpheme of the northern part of the Ladakhi Changthang: /-pak/, /-phak/, or {-puk} (< pa.-ḥdug). To some extent, the functions of this morpheme correspond to the so-called ‘evidentially neutral’ or ‘factual’ marker pa.red of Standard Spoken Tibetan. However, the morpheme in question cannot be described as being ‘evidentially’ or ‘epistemically’ neutral.
Chhitkul-Rākchham has a postverbal marker, =niŋ, denoting “engagement”, a newly proposed category that encodes the relative accessibility of a state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. Statistically rare (60 instantiations in an 8-hour corpus consisting of monologues, conversations and stimuli tasks) and with its occurrence entirely pragmatically motivated, =niŋ is constrained to contexts where the speaker confidently assumes that the interlocutor shares the knowledge about the situation expressed by the clause to which it is attached. As such, it differs from two additional members of the same category, the tags man=ta and ne=te, which convey a lesser degree of assertiveness in comparison. Whereas =niŋ is independent from evidentiality (but not from reliability judgements), the previous two tags, where the perceptual =ta or an alternant (=te) is a key component, are not. Engagement is otherwise found to be incompatible with unexpectedness and common knowledge, two pragmatic functions sometimes served by evidentials cross-linguistically. The Chhitkul-Rākchham case thus suggests that any idea of a clear-cut distinction between engagement and evidentiality is inconclusive.
Some Yi/Ngwi languages exhibit functionally versatile word classes, including nouns which can be used as both referential arguments and adjuncts, covering functions typically associated with adverbs. As a result, adverbs are often treated as a residual word class in the literature on these languages. This article aims to complement the picture of adverbiality in this subbranch of Tibeto-Burman by offering novel data on Phola, a Yi/Ngwi language of Yunnan. It is shown how adverbial expressions of time, space and manner exhibit unique constructional properties, which set them apart from nominal expressions. Very particularly, Phola adverbial expressions, in contradistinction to canonical nouns, must be relativised before they can be used as noun-modifiers. This suggests they are underlyingly part of the verb phrase, a property that lexical adverbs exhibit in languages where their existence as a word class is uncontroversial. The Phola facts are compared to those of other Ngwi languages, especially Lahu, the single best described Ngwi language, where adverbial expressions are largely found to be constructionally identical with canonical nouns. The differences between such two closely related languages highlight the need for a stronger focus on language-internal distributional criteria when addressing the thorny task of defining and assigning word classes.
Changki is one of three Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Ao in Nagaland (India), the other two being Mongsen and Jungli, the prestige language. Though no proper research has been done, Changki has always been considered to be linguistically closer to Mongsen by the Ao as well as in earlier literature. With a phonemic inventory of four vowels, six diphthongs, 21 consonants, and three contrastive tones, the phonological system is similar to both Mongsen and Jungli, but closer to Mongsen. Several differences are also observed. Based on the phonological description, the present orthography is also discussed in this paper, with suggestions that will make the orthography more consistent and transparent, reducing learnability issues.
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of reduplication in Khiamniungan, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Northeast India and parts of Myanmar. Reduplication in Khiamniungan is common across worrd classes. The study identifies and categorizes four primary reduplicative strategies: (1) echo formations, where partial reduplication creates semantically modified words; (2) compounding reduplication, in which morphologically independent stems combine to form new lexical items; (3) full reduplication, used for emphasis, pluralization, quantification, and manner marking; and (4) expressive reduplication, which encodes sensory and onomatopoeic meanings. The paper highlights the syntactic and semantic functions of reduplicated forms, illustrating their role in quantification, habitual aspect marking, imperative constructions, and intensification. While complete reduplication is pervasive across word classes, partial reduplication and echo formations are comparatively less common but still attested. Additionally, Khiamniungan exhibits a robust system of expressive reduplication that encodes sensory perception, aligning with patterns observed in other Tibeto-Burman languages. This study contributes to the broader understanding of reduplication in the Patkaian (Northern Naga) linguistic subgroup and sheds light on typological features relevant to Tibeto-Burman languages as a whole.
This paper presents a phonological sketch Maring, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in southeastern part of Manipur in Northeast India. It begins by highlighting some of the previous works done in Maring. Then it goes on to describe the phonemic inventory of the consonants, vowels and tones, as well as the syllable structure and the phonotactics. The paper also highlights some prevalent morphophonological processes occurring in the language. In the absence of a standard writing system, many disyllabic words are becoming monosyllabic both in the spoken form as well as in written form. This sometimes leads to form consonant clusters. Thus, this paper attempts to describe the sound system of Maring and bring forth some of the prevalent sound changes happening in the language. This will be helpful to the community for developing orthography and grammars, and for those working on the phonology, sound change, historical linguistics etc of the lesser known and less described languages of Northeast India.
This research paper investigates the negative particles in the Pagro variety of Mising, a synthetic and agglutinative language with a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order. Similar to other Tani languages within the Tibeto-Burman (Trans-Himalayan) language family, Mising utilizes post-verbal negative particles. The study specifically examines the negative markers /-ma/ and /-jɔ/ across various sentence structures to provide a detailed understanding of negation in Mising. The analysis includes a range of sentence types, highlighting the distinct functions of the standard negation marker /-ma/ and the prohibitive negation marker /-jɔ/. While previous research by Prasad (1991) and KC Talukdar (1992) focused on the negative particles /-ma/ and /-yo/, this paper addresses existing research gaps by exploring negation in different sentence constructions, including declarative, interrogative, and imperative forms. Additionally, the paper discusses the presence of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in Mising, a topic that has not been previously studied in this language.
Collocation in general, refers to the habitual and more predictable co-occurrences of lexical items in a syntactic construction. These lexical items co-occur by choice. Certain lexical items pull each other towards themselves and so their occurrence is more frequent than others. There is no explanation to why we say black tea but dark chocolate , or why blond goes only with hair and not with any other similar object. Collocation adorns an utterance with a more specific and unique sense. J.R Firth (1957) observed collocation as a part of the meaning of a word. This paper explores the basic morphological patterns of collocation in Assamese, a language of the Indo-Aryan family, spoken in the North-East Indian State of Assam. As collocations give interesting insights about how a language community perceives life and the world, I have chosen a few themes to see how creatively Assamese uses collocations and to observe their mappings with the morphological patterns. This paper also throws light on how ‘gender’ and the ‘formal-informal distinction’ affects collocations in Assamese.
This work investigates the acoustic properties of Angami vowels with the aim of definitively establishing the phonologically contrasting vowels in the language. Contrary to some previous studies that report seven monophthongs and multiple diphthongs, this study concludes that there are six monophthongs and two diphthongs in the language. The acoustic characteristics associated with the monophthongs and the diphthongs are explored and reported in this work. For both monophthongs acoustic characteristics, such as, the first three formants (F1, F2, F3), and duration were explored. For diphthongs, acoustic features, such as, the first two formants (F1, F2), their discrete cosine transforms (DCT) and duration were explored. The salient of the vowels in terms of their acoustic properties was substantiated by statistical analyses.
The paper attempts to describe the different causative constructions in Tenyidie. Based on the processes of derivation involved, they are divided into three different types. While the first type is derived from intransitive as well as transitive verbs which are from different semantic domain, the second and third types are derived from different subclass of intransitive verbs; the second type is associated with the ‘move’ class of verb and the third type is associated with the ‘change’ class of verb. The paper provides a glimpse of how phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics interact in the derivation of causative construction in Tenyidie.
This contribution describes caritive expressions in Suansu, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Manipur, North-East India. Two distinct morphosyntactic caritive constructions can be identified in Suansu: the first, semantically restricted to human absentees, involves the comitative particle ʈʂidə and the negated main verb. The other strategy, more prominent and found in all semantic contexts, consists of a biclausal construction with a negated ancillary clause embedded in the main one. The types of verbs -and their specificity- used in the ancillary clause vary depending on the functions and meanings of the absentee. However, the use of the verb thõn ‘to be inside’ in the ancillary caritive clause appears to be predominant and extends to unexpected semantic contexts, signaling a possible grammaticalization process of this verb in caritive expressions.
This paper presents a pan-dialectal synchronic survey and documentation of preinitials in the Horpa cluster (West Gyalrongic). Based on fieldwork and analysis of earlier Horpa scholarship, the study not only describes the preinitial systems of ten Horpa varieties covering all proposed branches of the Horpa cluster of West Gyalrongic, but it also identifies four key parameters of variation in the preinitial systems, namely the presence or absence of 1. guttural, 2. sigmatic, and 3. liquid contrasts in addition to the presence and absence of 4. weakened semivowel preinitials. The study contributes to the ongoing documentation and analysis of Horpa varieties, many of which are now endangered. Due to the phonological conservatism of the Gyalrongic languages, the Horpa preinitialed consonant clusters have the potential to offer insights and new perspectives for the investigation of Sino-Tibetan diachronic phonology.
