Assamese language

Assamese অসমীয়া Ôxômiya
Spoken in:	India, Bangladesh, Bhutan
Region:	Assam
Total speakers:	20 million
Ranking:	65
Language family:	Indo-European  Indo-Iranian   Indic (Indo-Aryan)    Magadhi Prakrit     Apabhramsa Avahattha      Bengali-Assamese       Assamese group        Assamese
Writing system:	Assamese script
Official status
Official language of:	Assam
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	as
ISO 639-2:	asm
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	asm
This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More...

Assamese (অসমীয়া) or Ôxômiya (IPA [ɔxɔmija]) is a language spoken in the state of Assam in northeast India. It is also the official language of Assam. It is spoken in parts of Arunachal Pradesh and other northeast Indian states. Small pockets of Assamese speakers can be found in Bhutan and Bangladesh. Immigrants from Assam have carried the language with them to other parts of the world. The easternmost of Indo-European languages, it is spoken by over 20 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. But the people themselves call their state Ôxôm and their language Ôxômiya.

Formation of Assamese

Assamese and the cognate languages, Bengali and Oriya, developed from Magadhi Apabhramsa, the eastern branch of the Apabhramsa that followed Prakrit. Written records in an earlier form of the Assamese script can be traced to 6th/7th century AD when Kamarupa (part of present-day Bengal was also a part of ancient Kamarupa) was ruled by the Varman dynasty. Assamese language features have been discovered in the 9th century Charyapada, which are Buddhist verses discovered in 1907 in Nepal, and which came from the end of the Apabhramsa period. Earliest examples of the language appeared in the early 14th century, composed during the reign of the Kamata king Durlabhnarayana of the Khen dynasty. Since the time of the Charyapada over the passage of the centuries it has been influenced by the languages belonging to the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families giving it a characteristic expressiveness and charm.

Writing

Assamese uses the Assamese script, which traces its descent from an eastern variant of the Gupta script. 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. Hemkosh, the second Assamese dictionary, introduced spellings based on Sanskrit which are now the standard.

Phonetics

The Assamese phonetic inventory consists of eight oral vowel phonemes, three nasalized vowel phonemes, fifteen diphthongs (two nasalized diphthongs) and twenty-one consonant phonemes [1].

In IPA Transcription

In Romanization

For a consistent phonemic representation of the Assamese language, all English-language Wikipedia articles that include words in Assamese will use the following Romanization scheme.

Assamese phonetics has many distinguishing features vis-à-vis the other Indic 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 dental stops and retroflex stops both merged into alveolar stops. This makes Assamese resemble non-Indic languages in its use of the coronal 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 fricative x,[2] 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 Alphabet. This sound [x] was present in the Proto-Indo-European language and in Vedic Sanskrit, but disappeared in classical Sanskrit. It was brought back into the phonology of Assamese as a result of lenition of the three Sanskrit sibilants. This sound is present in other nearby languages, like Chittagonian.

The sound is variously transcribed in the IPA as a voicelss velar fricative [x], a voiceless uvular fricative [χ], and a voiceless velar approximant [ɰ̥] 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.

Vowel inventory

Eastern Indic languages like Assamese, Bengali, Sylheti, and Oriya do not have a vowel length distinction, but have a wide set of low vowels. In the case of Assamese, there are two phonetically low vowels, central a [a] and its back rounded counterpart å [ɒ]. This low back rounded vowel å [ɒ] is unique in this branch of the language family, and sounds very much to foreigners as something between [o] and [u]. It is used in many dialects of British English, including Received Pronunciation, as in the word [pʰɒt] "pot" (note that this is not the same vowel in other dialects of English). This vowel is found in Assamese words such as påt [pɒt] "to bury".

Dialects

In the middle of the 19th century the dialect spoken in the Sibsagar 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 Guwahati, 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 dialects which he named (1) Eastern and (2) Western dialects. However, recent linguistic studies have identified four dialect groups [3] (Moral 1992^[1]), 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 group spoken in undivided Kamrup, Nalbari, Barpeta, Darrang, Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon districts
• Goalparia group spoken in Goalpara, Dhubri, Kokrajhar and Bongaigoan districts

Assamese literature

Main article: Assamese literature

There is a growing and strong body of literature in this language. The first characteristics of this language (along with Bangali and Oriya) are seen in the Charyapadas 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 Ramayana, 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

• Charyapada
• Languages of India
• List of national languages of India
• List of Indian languages by total speakers

References

External links

• English-Assamese Online Dictionary
• The Creative Visionary: Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla (1903-1951)
• Assamese Language and Literature
• Assamese Language Sample
• Ethnologue report for Assamese
• Xophura - Collection of writings in Assamese
• Indira Goswami: Jnapith awardee Asssamese writer and the peace initiator to solve the insurgency ULFA problem in Assam
• Assamese - UCLA Phonetics Lab Data

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