This work is a descriptive grammar of Denjongke, or Sikkimese Bhutia (also known as Lhoke or Sikkimese) (ISO 639-3 sip), an underdescribed and endangered Tibeto-Burman, Tibetic language spoken in the Indian state of Sikkim. The study is based on original fieldwork conducted over more than six years. The theoretical framework is functionalist-typological and may further be characterized as an application of Basic Linguistic Theory, which relies on the power of prose, instead of formalisms, to describe linguistic phenomena. Traditional grammatical terms are complemented by recourse to up-to-date typological information. The discussion is data-oriented and aims to describe Denjongke on its own terms, making a distinction between language-internal descriptive categories and cross-linguistic comparative concepts.

(A complete abstract is included in the grammar)

This article is the first in-depth study of the Nepali discourse particle ni. The first part summarizes how ni has been treated in previous works on Nepali and shows how Östman’s (1981) analysis of the often-used English translation equivalent of ni, ‘you know’, gives a hint about the semantics of ni. Then, deriving data mainly from Narayan Wagle’s novel Palpasa café, which includes colloquial dialogues, but also from other sources, the paper illustrates the declarative, interrogative and imperative uses of ni. The common denominator between the various uses of ni is shown to be that the speaker brings something to the forefront of the addressee’s attention. The last section compares the concept of attention to the related concepts contrastive focus and mirative.

Denjongke is atypical within Tibetic languages in how speaker’s inner sensations such as hunger, cold, feeling of illness and emotions are expressed. Whereas most other Tibetic languages use a sensorial evidential form in default expressions of speaker’s inner sensations (Tournadre 2021, 2023 preprint), Denjongke uses a variety of other forms. The sensorial forms may also be used when the speaker takes an outsider's perspective on their inner sensations in contexts such as surprise and sudden discovery. The reason why Denjongke, unlike Common Tibetan and some other Tibetic languages, can use personal forms for expressing the speaker’s inner sensations is that Denjongke personal forms are not associated with volitionality, whereas the personal/egophoric forms of Common Tibetan and some other Tibetic languages are strongly associated with volitionality.