Assamese (
) is the easternmost Indo-Aryan language. It is used mainly in the
stateIndia is a federal union of states comprising twenty-eight states and seven union territories. The states and territories are further subdivided into districts and so on.- States and territories :...
of
AssamAssam ) is a northeastern state of India with its capital at Dispur located in the Guwahati city. Located south of the eastern Himalayas, Assam comprises the Brahmaputra and the Barak river valleys and the Karbi Anglong and the North Cachar Hills with an area of 30,285 square miles...
in
North-East IndiaNorth-East India refers to the easternmost region of India consisting of the contiguous Seven Sister States, Sikkim, and parts of North Bengal . North-East India is ethnically, linguistically and culturally very distinct from the other states of India. This region is officially recognized as a...
. It is also the official language of Assam. It is also spoken in parts of
Arunachal PradeshArunachal Pradesh is the easternmost state of India. Arunachal Pradesh borders with the Indian state of Assam to the south and Nagaland to the southeast. Burma/Myanmar lies towards the east, Bhutan towards the west, and its boundary with the People's Republic of China to the north is disputed and...
and other
northeastNorth-East India refers to the easternmost region of India consisting of the contiguous Seven Sister States, Sikkim, and parts of North Bengal . North-East India is ethnically, linguistically and culturally very distinct from the other states of India. This region is officially recognized as a...
Indian states. Small pockets of Assamese speakers can be found in
BhutanThe Kingdom of Bhutan is a landlocked nation in South Asia, located at the eastern end of the Himalaya Mountains and is bordered to the south, east and west by the Republic of India and to the north by People's Republic of China. Bhutan is separated from the nearby state of Nepal to the west by...
. The easternmost of
Indo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia...
, it is spoken by over 13 million people.
The English word "Assamese" is built on the same principle as "Japanese", "Taiwanese", etc. It is based on the English word "Assam" by which the tract consisting of the Brahmaputra valley is known. The people call their state
and their language
.
Formation of Assamese
Assamese and the cognate languages,
MaithiliMaithili is a language spoken in the eastern part of India, mainly in the Indian state of Bihar and in the eastern Terai region of Nepal. It is an offshoot of the Indo-Aryan languages which are part of the Indo-Iranian, a branch of the Indo-European languages...
,
BengaliBengali or Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages....
and
OriyaOdia or Oriya is an Indian language, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is mainly spoken in the Indian state of Orissa. The language is also one of the many official languages of India.- Overview :...
, developed from
Magadhi PrakritMagadhi Prakrit is of one of the three Dramatic Prakrits, the written languages of Ancient India following the decline of Sanskrit. Magadhi Prakrit was spoken in the eastern Indian subcontinent, in a region spanning what is now eastern India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. It is believed to be the language...
. According to linguist
Suniti Kumar ChatterjiSuniti Kumar Chatterji was a Bengali Indian linguist, educationist, litterateur. He was born on 26 October, 1890 at Shibpur in Howrah. He was the son of Haridas Chattopadhyay, an affluent Kulin Brahmin...
, the Magadhi Prakrit in the east gave rise to four Apabhramsa dialects: Radha, Vanga, Varendra and Kamarupa; and the
Kamarupa ApabhramsaKamrupi is the language that was spoken in the Kamarupa kingdom in the first millennium, which, some linguists claim, gave rise to or influenced various eastern Indo-European languages like Assamese and Bengali....
, keeping to the north of the Ganges, gave rise to the North Bengal dialects in
West BengalWest Bengal is a state in eastern India. With Bangladesh, which lies on its eastern border, the state forms the ethno-linguistic region of Bengal. To its northeast lie the states of Assam and Sikkim and the country Bhutan, and to its southwest, the state of Orissa...
and Assamese in the Brahmaputra valley. Though early compositions in Assamese exist from the 13th century, the earliest relics of the language can be found in paleographic records of the Kamarupa Kingdom from the 5th century to the 12th century. Assamese language features have been discovered in the 9th century
CharyapadaThe Charyapada is a collection of 8th-12th century Vajrayana Buddhist caryagiti, or mystical poems from the tantric tradition in eastern India. Being caryagiti, or 'songs of realization' the Charyapada were intended to be sung...
, which are Buddhist verses discovered in 1907 in Nepal, and which came from the end of the Apabhramsa period. Early compositions matured in the 14th century, during the reign of the
KamataThe Kamata kingdom appeared in the western part of the older Kamarupa kingdom in the 13th century, after the fall of the Pala dynasty. The rise of the Kamata kingdom marked the end of the ancient period in the History of Assam and the beginning of the medieval period. The first rulers were the...
king Durlabhnarayana of the
Khen dynastyThe Khen dynasty of Assam replaced the Pala dynasty in the 12th century. Their accession marks the end of the Kamarupa kingdom, and the beginning of the Kamata kingdom....
, when Madhav Kandali composed the
Kotha RamayanaKotha Ramayana is a poem written by the powerful Assamese poet Madhava Kandali during the 14th century and is one of many versions of Ramayana in a regional Indian language other than Valmiki's Ramayana in Sanskrit...
. Since the time of the Charyapada, Assamese has been influenced by the languages belonging to the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families.
Assamese became the court language in the
Ahom kingdomThe Ahom Kingdom was a medieval kingdom in the Brahmaputra valley in Assam that maintained its sovereignty for nearly 600 years and successfully resisted Mughal expansion in North-East India...
by the 17th century.
Writing
Assamese uses the
Assamese scriptThe Assamese script is a variant of the Eastern Nagari script also used for Bengali and Bishnupriya Manipuri. The Eastern Nagari script belongs to the Brahmic family of scripts and has a continuous history of development from Nagari script, a precursor of Devanagari...
, a variant of the
Eastern Nagari scriptThe Eastern Nagari script is an Abugida system of writing belonging to the Brahmic family of scripts whose use is associated with the Assamese, Bengali, Maithili, Mising, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Meitei Manipuri, Sylheti, and Chittagonian languages...
, which traces its descent from the
Gupta scriptThe Gupta script was used for writing Sanskrit and is associated with the Gupta Empire of India which was a period of material prosperity and great religious and scientific developments. The Gupta script was descended from Brahmi and gave rise to the Nagari, Sharada and Siddham scripts...
. There is a strong tradition of writing from early times. Examples can be seen in edicts, land grants and copper plates of medieval kings. Assam had its own system of writing on the bark of the
saanchi tree in which religious texts and chronicles were written. The present-day spellings in Assamese are not necessarily phonetic.
HemkoshHemkosh is the first etymological dictionary of the Assamese Language based on Sanskrit spellings, compiled by Hemchandra Barua. It was first published in 1900 under the supervision of Capt. P. R. Gordon, ISC and Hemchandra Goswami, 33 years after the publication of the Bronson’s dictionary. It...
, the second Assamese dictionary, introduced spellings based on
SanskritSanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India. It is also declared as a classical language by the government of India....
which are now the standard.
Morphology and grammar
The Assamese language has the following characteristic morphological features
- Gender and number are not grammatically marked
- There is lexical distinction of gender in the third person pronoun.
- Transitive verbs are distinguished from intransitive.
- The agentive case is overtly marked as distinct from the accusative.
- Kinship nouns are inflected for personal pronominal possession.
- Adverbs can be derived from the verb roots.
- A passive construction may be employed idiomatically.
Phonology
The Assamese phonemic inventory consists of eight oral vowel phonemes, three nasalized vowel phonemes, fifteen diphthongs (two nasalized diphthongs) and twenty-one consonant phonemes. For a consistent
phonemicIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
representation of the Assamese language, all English-language Wikipedia articles that include words in Assamese will use the Romanization scheme.
In International Phonetic AlphabetThe International Phonetic Alphabet
["The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...]
(IPA) and RomanizationIn linguistics, romanization or latinization, alternately spelt as latinisation or romanisation , is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system...
(ROM) transcriptions
Vowels
| |
Front |
Central |
Back |
| |
IPA |
ROM |
IPA |
ROM |
IPA |
ROM |
| High |
| i |
|
|
| u |
| High-mid |
|
|
|
|
| û |
| Mid |
| e |
|
|
| o |
| Low-mid |
| ê |
|
|
| ô |
| Low |
|
|
| a |
|
|
|
Consonants
| |
Labial |
Alveolar |
Velar |
Glottal |
| |
IPA |
ROM |
IPA |
ROM |
IPA |
ROM |
IPA |
ROM |
| Voiceless stops |
|
p
ph |
|
t
th |
|
k
kh |
|
|
| Voiced stops |
|
b
bh |
|
d
dh |
|
g
gh |
|
|
| Voiceless fricatives |
|
|
| s |
| x |
| h |
| Voiced fricatives |
|
|
| z |
|
|
|
|
| Nasals |
| m |
| n |
| ng |
|
|
| Approximants |
| w |
| l,r |
|
|
|
|
Assamese phonetics has many distinguishing features
vis-à-vis the other
IndicIndic can refer to:* Indo-Aryan languages* Indic scripts* Related to South Asia* of or related to India ; see Indica...
languages of the Indo-European family.
Alveolar Stops
The Assamese phoneme inventory is unique in the Indic group of languages in its lack of a dental-retroflex distinction in coronal stops. Historically, the
dentalIn linguistics, a dental consonant or dental is a consonant that is articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , , , and in some languages...
stops and retroflex stops both merged into
alveolarThe alveolar plosive is a consonant sound. Two kinds are distinguished:* Voiced alveolar plosive * Voiceless alveolar plosive...
stops. This makes Assamese resemble non-Indic languages in its use of the
coronalCoronal may refer to:* anything relating to a corona* Coronal view, an anatomical term of location.* Coronal loop* In linguistics, coronals refer to coronal consonants.* In zoology, the coronal plane is an anatomical term of location...
major place of articulation. The only other language to have fronted retroflex stops into alveolars is the closely-related eastern dialects of Bengali (although a contrast with dental stops remains in those dialects).
Voiceless Velar Fricative
Unlike most eastern Indic languages, Assamese is also noted for the presence of the
voiceless velar fricativeThe voiceless velar fricative, informally known as the hard ch, is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is x...
x,(
x, IITG, pronounced by a native speaker) historically derived from what used to be coronal sibilants. The derivation of the velar fricative from the coronal sibilant [s] is evident in the name of the language in Assamese; some Assamese prefer to write
Oxomiya/
Ôxômiya instead of
Asomiya/
Asamiya to reflect the sound, represented by [x] in the
International Phonetic AlphabetThe International Phonetic Alphabet
["The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...]
. This sound [x] was present in
Vedic SanskritVedic Sanskrit is an Old Indic language. It is the language of the Vedas, the oldest shruti texts of Hinduism, compiled over the period of the mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BC. It is an archaic form of Sanskrit, an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian. It is closely related to Avestan, the...
, but disappeared in classical Sanskrit. It was brought back into the phonology of Assamese as a result of
lenitionLenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages. Along with assimilation, it is one of the primary sources of historical change of languages....
of the three Sanskrit sibilants. This sound is present in other nearby languages, like
ChittagonianChittagonian is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the people of Chittagong in Bangladesh and in much of the southeast of the country. It is closely related to Bangla, but is normally considered by linguists to be a separate language and not a dialect of Bangla, as the two are not inherently...
.
The sound is variously transcribed in the IPA as a voiceless velar fricative , a voiceless uvular fricative , and a voiceless velar approximant by leading phonologists and phoneticians. Some variations of the sound is expected within different population groups and dialects, and depending on the speaker, speech register, and quality of recording, all three symbols may approximate the acoustic reading of the actual Assamese phoneme.
Velar nasal
Assamese, in contrast to other Indo-Aryan languages, uses the velar nasal extensively. In these languages the velar nasal is always attached to a homorganic sound, whereas it is used singly in Assamese.
Vowel inventory
Eastern Indic languages like Assamese,
BengaliBengali or Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages....
,
SylhetiSylheti is the language of Sylhet, the north-eastern region of Bangladesh, and also spoken in parts of the North-East Indian states of Assam and Tripura...
, and
OriyaOdia or Oriya is an Indian language, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is mainly spoken in the Indian state of Orissa. The language is also one of the many official languages of India.- Overview :...
do not have a vowel length distinction, but have a wide set of back rounded vowels. In the case of Assamese, there are four back rounded vowels, including
ô ,
o ,
û , and
u . These four vowels contrast phonemically, as demonstrated by the minimal set কলা
kôla 'deaf', ক'লা
kola 'black', কোলা
kûla 'lap', and কুলা
kula 'winnowing fan'.
The high-mid back rounded vowel
û is unique in this branch of the language family, and sounds very much to foreigners as something between and . This vowel is found in Assamese words such as পোত
pût "to bury".
Dialects
In the middle of the 19th century the dialect spoken in the
SibsagarSibsagar is a city in the Sibsagar district in the state of Assam in India. It is the district headquarters of the Sibsagar district.- Geography :Sibsagar is located at . It has an average elevation of 95 metres .- Demographics :...
area came into focus because it was made the official language of the state by the British and because the Christian missionaries based their work in this region. Now the Assamese spoken in and around
GuwahatiGuwahati is a major city in eastern India, often considered as the gateway to the North-East Region of the country and is the largest city within the region. Dispur, the capital of the Indian state of Assam is situated within the city. Guwahati is one of the most rapidly growing cities in India...
, located geographically in the middle of the Assamese spoken region, is accepted as the standard Assamese. The Assamese taught in schools and used in newspapers today has evolved and incorporated elements from different dialects of the language. Banikanta Kakati identified two
dialectThe term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by scholars of language. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other...
s which he named (1) Eastern and (2) Western dialects. However, recent linguistic studies have identified four dialect groups
http://www.iitg.ernet.in/rcilts/asamiya.htm (Moral 1992), listed below from east to west:
- Eastern group, spoken in and other districts around Sibsagar district
- Central group spoken in present Nagaon district and adjoining areas
- Kamrupi
Kamrupi is the language that was spoken in the Kamarupa kingdom in the first millennium, which, some linguists claim, gave rise to or influenced various eastern Indo-European languages like Assamese and Bengali....
group spoken in undivided Kamrup, Nalbari, Barpeta, Darrang, Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon districts
- Goalparia
Goalpariya is a dialect of Assamese language, spoken in the erstwhile Goalpara district of Assam in India. It is largely spoken in Dhubri, Goalpara, Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon districts which were created from erstwhile Goalpara district...
group spoken primarily in the Dhubri and Goalpara districts and in certain areas of Kokrajhar and Bongaigoan districts
Assamese literature
There is a growing and strong body of literature in this language. The first characteristics of this language are seen in the
CharyapadaThe Charyapada is a collection of 8th-12th century Vajrayana Buddhist caryagiti, or mystical poems from the tantric tradition in eastern India. Being caryagiti, or 'songs of realization' the Charyapada were intended to be sung...
s composed in the 8th-12th century. The first examples emerge in writings of court poets in the 14th century, the finest example of which is Madhav Kandali's
Kotha RamayanaKotha Ramayana is a poem written by the powerful Assamese poet Madhava Kandali during the 14th century and is one of many versions of Ramayana in a regional Indian language other than Valmiki's Ramayana in Sanskrit...
, as well as popular ballad in the form of Ojapali. The 16th—17th century saw a flourishing of Vaishnavite literature, leading up to the emergence of modern forms of literature in the late 19th century.
See also
External links
The language of India