Himalayan Linguistics

Languages and Peoples of the Eastern Himalayan Region

• A description of Changki-Ao phonology with a note on orthography

  • T, Temsunungsang;
  • Changkija, Amenla, I

  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.

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• A study of the Morphological Patterns of Collocation in Assamese: A Thematic Overview

  • Handique, Mouchumi

  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.

• Negation in Mising

  • Doley, Normoda

  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.

   

• A Phonological Sketch of Maring

  • Kanshouwa, Susie

  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.

• Reduplication In Khiamniungan

  • Thaam, Keen

  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.