Himalayan Linguistics

This paper provides an overview of Pangkhua, a South Central Tibeto-Burman (Kuki-Chin) language of Bangladesh. Pangkhua is an underdocumented and a largely endangered language spoken by about 2000 people in Rangamati District, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. In this overview, first, I examine Pangkhua’s position in the internal subclassifications of the South Central subgroup and show that its position in the subgroup is not as obvious as has often been regarded. Then, I discuss some of Pangkhua’s basic and typologically important characteristics including phonology, morphology, and syntax. As a first account of Pangkhua, this overview will facilitate areal-typological as well as historical and comparative South Central Tibeto-Burman linguistics research.

The paper looks into the derivation of nominals in Biate at the word and sentence levels.  The derivational process at the word level is productive compared to the nominalized clauses in the language.

Nominalization process is a key phenomenon in Kuki-Chin syntax. Most of the Kuki-Chin languages spoken in Assam, India, seem to follow the similar pattern of nominalization. Languages like Hrangkhol, Khelma, Hmar and others mainly has open syllabic structure like –pa, -na, -tu etc as a nominalizer to derive nominals both at the word and clausal level. Biate, has three morphological nominalizers: -tu, -na, -a and a zero morpheme which derives nominals at the word level. At the clausal level, the nominalizer –a and the zero morphemes is used.

Kuki-Chin languages like Hrangkhol and Khelma use gender markers –pa (masculine) and –nu (famine) to derive nominal at word level. However, the use of gender marker is not seen in case of Biate. Normally, distal and proximal demonstratives also play an important role in the nominalization processes in Kuki-Chin languages. Βiate does have this feature. The relative clause markers in the Tibeto Burman languages behave as the nominalizer, Biate has a null relativizer.

Nominalization process in Βiate differ from Khelma, Hrangkhol, Hmar and others. This paper will provide a detailed account of the nominalization process in Biate.

This paper is a preliminary description of the phonology of Sherdukpen language, which is spoken in Rupa, a valley town in the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh. Sherdukpen is a highly endangered language with a population of around 4000 speakers in total (Eberhard et al. 2021). The language has not been adequately described and documented yet (cf. Jacquesson 2015). The analysis of the language is based on the data collected in my recent field visit to Rupa in December 2021.

This paper presents morphophonemic alternations in Thadou, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Kuki-Chin subgroup spoken in Northeast India and Myanmar (Burma). Section 1 introduces the language in terms of its place within the Kuki-Chin subgroup and the phonological and morphosyntactic features. Section 2 presents the phonemic inventories of Thadou, the modifications of vowels and consonants, syllable structure, and length contrasts. The remainder of the paper is devoted to discussing the various morphophonemic changes in Thadou. Section 3.1 discusses morphophonemic changes due, namely progressive and regressive assimilation. Section 3.2 to 3.5 discusses morphophonemic changes that take place when two morphemes/syllables concatenate according to the morphosyntactic rules of the language. These include deletion glide insertion, vowel change, vowel reduction, cluster formation, and consonant deletion. Section 4 and 5 deal with the segmental changes that verb stems display and tonal changes between tones in juxtaposition. Finally, the paper concludes with a summary of the paper.