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Assamese
অসমীয়া Ôxômiya
Spoken in	India, Bhutan & US (Delaware, New Jersey & New York)
Region	Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland - (Assamese or a dialogue variant of Assamese) and some other parts of North-East India and smaller pockets of speakers in Pune - Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Bangalore, Karnataka, among others[1]
Native speakers	13 million  (2001)[2]
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Eastern Assamese–Bengali Assamese
Writing system	Assamese script
Official status
Official language in	India (Assam)
Regulated by	Assam Sahitya Sabha (literature/rhetorical congress of Assam)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	as
ISO 639-2	asm
ISO 639-3	asm
Linguasphere	59-AAF-w
This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More...
This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Assamese (অসমীয়া Ôxômiya) (IPA: [ɔxɔmija]) is Eastern Indo-Aryan language . It is used mainly in the state of Assam in North-East India. It is the official language of Assam. It is also spoken in parts of Arunachal Pradesh and other northeast Indian states. Nagamese, an Assamese-based Creole language is widely used in Nagaland and parts of Assam. Small pockets of Assamese speakers can be found in Bhutan. The easternmost of Indo-European languages, it is spoken by over 13 million as a native language.^[2]

Along with other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Assamese evolved circa 1000–1200 AD from the Magadhi Prakrit, which developed from a dialect or group of dialects that were close to, but different from, Vedic and Classical Sanskrit.^[3]. It is written with the Assamese script. Assamese is written from left to right and top to bottom, in the same manner as English. A large number of ligatures are possible since potentially all the consonants can combine with one another. Vowels can either be independent or dependent upon a consonant or a consonant cluster.

The English word "Assamese" is built on the same principle as "Sinhalese", "Japanese" etc. It is based on the name "Assam" by which the tract consisting of the Brahmaputra Valley was known. The people call their state Ôxôm and their language Ôxômiya.

Genealogically, Assamese belongs to the group of Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, here marked in yellow.

History[link]

Assamese and the cognate languages, Maithili, Bengali and Oriya, developed from Magadhi Prakrit.^[4] According to linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji, the Magadhi Prakrit in the east gave rise to four Apabhramsa dialects: Radha, Vanga, Varendra and Kamarupa; and the Kamarupa Apabhramsa, keeping to the north of the Ganges, gave rise to the North Bengal dialects in West Bengal and Assamese in the Brahmaputra valley.^[5] Though early compositions in Assamese exist from the thirteenth century, the earliest relics of the language can be found in paleographic records of the Kamarupa Kingdom from the fifth century to the twelfth century.^[6] Assamese language features have been discovered in the ninth century Charyapada, which are Buddhist verses discovered in 1907 in Nepal, and which came from the end of the Apabhramsa period. Early compositions matured in the fourteenth century, during the reign of the Kamata king Durlabhnarayana of the Khen dynasty, when Madhav Kandali composed the Saptakanda Ramayana. 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 kingdom by the seventeenth century.^[7]

Writing system[link]

Assamese uses the Assamese script, a variant which traces its descent from the Gupta script. It resembles very closely to the Mithilakshar script of the Maithili language as well as to the Bengali script.^[8] 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.

Morphology and grammar[link]

The Assamese language has the following characteristic morphological features^[9]

• 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[link]

The Assamese phonemic inventory consists of eight oral vowel phonemes, three nasalized vowel phonemes, fifteen diphthongs (two nasalized diphthongs) and twenty-one consonant phonemes.^[10] For a consistent phonemic representation of the Assamese language, all English-language Wikipedia articles that include words in Assamese will use the Romanization scheme.

In International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Romanization (ROM) transcriptions

Alveolar stops[link]

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[link]

Unlike most eastern Indic languages, Assamese is also noted for the presence of the voiceless velar fricative 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 Alphabet. This sound appeared in the phonology of Assamese as a result of lenition of the three Sanskrit sibilants. It is present in other nearby languages, like Chittagonian.

The sound is variously transcribed in the IPA as a voiceless 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.

Velar nasal[link]

Assamese and Bengali, in contrast to other Indo-Aryan languages, use the velar nasal (the English ng in sing) extensively. In many languages the velar nasal is always attached to a homorganic sound, whereas in Assamese it can occur intervocalically.^[11]

Vowel inventory[link]

Eastern Indic languages like Assamese, Bengali, Sylheti, and Oriya 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 [ɔ], o [o], û [ʊ], and u [u]. These four vowels contrast phonemically, as demonstrated by the minimal set কলা kôla [kɔla] 'deaf', ক'লা kola [kola] 'black', কোলা kûla [kʊla] 'lap', and কুলা kula [kula] 'winnowing fan'.

The high-mid back rounded vowel ও û [ʊ] is unique in this branch of the language family, and sounds very much to foreigners as something between অ' o [o] and উ u [u]. This vowel is found in Assamese words such as পোত pût [pʊt] "to bury".

Dialects[link]

In the middle of the nineteenth 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. 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 [2] (Moral 1992),^[12] listed below from east to west:

• Eastern group, spoken in and other districts around Sibsagar district
• Central group spoken in present Nagaon, Sonitpur, Morigaon districts and adjoining areas
• Kamrupi group spoken in undivided Kamrup, Nalbari, Barpeta, Darrang, Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon districts
• Goalparia group spoken primarily in the Dhubri and Goalpara districts and in certain areas of Kokrajhar and Bongaigoan districts

Literature[link]

There is a growing and strong body of literature in this language. The first characteristics of this language are seen in the Charyapadas composed in the eighth-12th century. The first examples emerge in writings of court poets in the fourteenth century, the finest example of which is Madhav Kandali's Saptakanda Ramayana, as well as popular ballad in the form of Ojapali. The sixteenth—17th century saw a flourishing of Vaishnavite literature, leading up to the emergence of modern forms of literature in the late nineteenth century.

See also[link]

• Indo-Aryan languages
• Charyapada
• Languages of India
• Languages with official status in India
• List of Indian languages by total speakers
• List of languages by number of native speakers
• Xobdo

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Assamese language

Assamese language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Candrakānta abhidhāna : Asamiyi sabdara butpatti aru udaharanere Asamiya-Ingraji dui bhashara artha thaka abhidhana. second ed. Guwahati : Guwahati Bisbabidyalaya, 1962.
• A Dictionary in Assamese and English (1867) First Assamese dictionary by Miles Bronson from (books.google.com)
• English-Assamese Online Dictionary
• English translation - Assamese Literature
• The Creative Visionary: Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla (1903-1951)
• Ethnologue report for Assamese
• Assamese – UCLA Phonetics Lab Data
• Assamese computing resources at TDIL
• Bharatiya Bhasha Jyoti: Asamiya —a textbook for learning Assamese through Hindi from the Central Institute of Indian Languages.
• Learn Assamese (Organization teaching grammar vocabulary and phrases)

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lez:Ассам чӀал

This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from related articles; suggestions may be available. (February 2010)

Ami Chand is a Fiji Indian politician who won the Ba West Indian Communal Constituency, one of the 19 seats reserved for Fiji citizens of Indian origin, for the Fiji Labour Party during the 1999 elections for the House of Representatives.

On 19 May 2000, He was among the 43 members of the People's Coalition Government, led by Mahendra Chaudhry, taken hostage by George Speight and his band of rebel Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) soldiers from the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Unit. He was released on 21 May 2000, after he signed a paper resigning his seat in Parliament.^[1]

References[link]

1. ^ Fiji Labour Party - Activities Report: 1999-2000

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