Recent himalayanlinguistics items

The Dual Formative *tsi in Tibeto-Burman Languages

Tue, 3 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A pronominal dual formative derivable from *tsi, *ntsi, or *tsiŋ is attested sufficiently broadly across the Tibeto-Burman languages to require that these be reconstructed to the proto-language. In most of these languages only one of these forms occurs, and combines with pronouns to form compositional duals. However, several languages show clear association of *tsi with inclusive dual, and *ntsi with second person dual; there is also some evidence for an originally exclusive value of *tsiŋ. This paper presents the comparative evidence for these, with evidence from various clades supporting the reconstructed person values of the three forms, and suggests a preliminary account of the develoments which have resulted in the replacement in most languages of the original 3-term paradigm with compositional forms.

Review of A Grammar of Malimasa with Annotated Texts and Glossary

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Grammar of Malimasa with Annotated Texts and Glossary (玛丽玛萨话语法研究及标注文本)

By Zihe Li (李子鹤)

Beijing: Peking University Press (北京大学出版社) 2024

Peking University Chinese Linguistics Research Series (“北大中国语言学研究丛书”)

ISBN 978-7-301-34862-8

xvii + 419 pages

Reviewed by Alexis Michaud

Results from the Linguistic Survey of Sikkim

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article re-examines a 2005-2006 school-based survey of language use across Sikkim, a multilingual Himalayan state in northeastern India. 16,527 students in classes VIII–XII from 105 schools answered questions about languages used with grandparents, parents, and siblings, and which they considered to be their “mother tongue”. Two patterns emerge from our reanalysis. Heritage languages are still used with elders, showing family-based maintenance. Yet everyday conversations among younger people increasingly shift to other languages—often those used in school and public life—especially in conversations between siblings. About one in nine parent pairs (11.24%) no longer use any of their parents’ languages, and about one in eight sibling groups (12.97%) use none of their parents’ languages. The “mother tongue” that students officially reported through the survey often differs from what they speak, highlighting a gap between linguistic identity and language practice. There are...

Acoustics of vowels in Angami

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This work investigates the acoustic properties of Angami vowels with the aim of definitively establishing the phonologically contrasting vowels in the language. Contrary to some previous studies that report seven monophthongs and multiple diphthongs, this study concludes that there are six monophthongs and two diphthongs in the language. The acoustic characteristics associated with the monophthongs and the diphthongs are explored and reported in this work. For both monophthongs acoustic characteristics, such as, the first three formants (F1, F2, F3), and duration were explored. For diphthongs, acoustic features, such as, the first two formants (F1, F2), their discrete cosine transforms (DCT) and duration were explored. The salient of the vowels in terms of their acoustic properties was substantiated by statistical analyses.

Negation in Mising

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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...

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

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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...

A Phonological Sketch of Maring

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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...

Reduplication In Khiamniungan

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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...

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

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The interplay of nominality and adverbiality in Phola

Wed, 1 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some Yi/Ngwi languages exhibit functionally versatile word classes, including nouns which can be used as both referential arguments and adjuncts, covering functions typically associated with adverbs. As a result, adverbs are often treated as a residual word class in the literature on these languages. This article aims to complement the picture of adverbiality in this subbranch of Tibeto-Burman by offering novel data on Phola, a Yi/Ngwi language of Yunnan. It is shown how adverbial expressions of time, space and manner exhibit unique constructional properties, which set them apart from nominal expressions. Very particularly, Phola adverbial expressions, in contradistinction to canonical nouns, must be relativised before they can be used as noun-modifiers. This suggests they are underlyingly part of the verb phrase, a property that lexical adverbs exhibit in languages where their existence as a word class is uncontroversial. The Phola facts are compared to those of other Ngwi...

A sketch grammar of Igu, the Shamanic language of the Kera’a

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper offers the first linguistic description of Igu, the shamanic language of the Kera’a (also 'Idu (Mishmi)'), and thus presents one of the first linguistic descriptions of an Eastern Himalayan ritual language. The Kera’a are a Tibeto-Burman-speaking society of ca. 10 000-16 000 members, based in and around the very northeastern Himalayan river valley of India, in the Dibang Valley and Lower Dibang Valley districts of Arunachal Pradesh. The Kera’a refer to their modern spoken language simply as Kera’a or Kera’a ekobe (‘Kera’a tongue’). For shamanic rituals, shamans recite in Igu (or Igu ekobe ), which the Kera’a consider to be a separate language from Kera'a. Igu is mastered and used by shamans (and their assistants) in rituals, as well as passively understood by knowledgeable elders. This paper demonstrates that Igu is a language in its own right, which partially differs on all core levels - lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic - from Kera'a. While these...

A little known past tense marker of the northern Changthang dialects of Ladakh

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article describes the various usages of a little known past tense morpheme of the northern part of the Ladakhi Changthang: /-pak/, /-phak/, or {-puk} (< pa.-ḥdug). To some extent, the functions of this morpheme correspond to the so-called ‘evidentially neutral’ or ‘factual’ marker pa.red of Standard Spoken Tibetan. However, the morpheme in question cannot be described as being ‘evidentially’ or ‘epistemically’ neutral.

The Category of Engagement in Chhitkul-Rākchham (West-Himalayish): The Post-Verbal Clitic =niŋ

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Chhitkul-Rākchham has a postverbal marker, =niŋ, denoting “engagement”, a newly proposed category that encodes the relative accessibility of a state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. Statistically rare (60 instantiations in an 8-hour corpus consisting of monologues, conversations and stimuli tasks) and with its occurrence entirely pragmatically motivated, =niŋ is constrained to contexts where the speaker confidently assumes that the interlocutor shares the knowledge about the situation expressed by the clause to which it is attached. As such, it differs from two additional members of the same category, the tags man=ta and ne=te, which convey a lesser degree of assertiveness in comparison. Whereas =niŋ is independent from evidentiality (but not from reliability judgements), the previous two tags, where the perceptual =ta or an alternant (=te) is a key component, are not. Engagement is otherwise...

Causative Derivations in Tenyidie

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The paper attempts to describe the different causative constructions in Tenyidie. Based on the processes of derivation involved, they are divided into three different types. While the first type is derived from intransitive as well as transitive verbs which are from different semantic domain, the second and third types are derived from different subclass of intransitive verbs; the second type is associated with the ‘move’ class of verb and the third type is associated with the ‘change’ class of verb. The paper provides a glimpse of how phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics interact in the derivation of causative construction in Tenyidie.

Caritive expression in Suansu

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This contribution describes caritive expressions in Suansu, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Manipur, North-East India. Two distinct morphosyntactic caritive constructions can be identified in Suansu: the first, semantically restricted to human absentees, involves the comitative particle ʈʂidə and the negated main verb. The other strategy, more prominent and found in all semantic contexts, consists of a biclausal construction with a negated ancillary clause embedded in the main one. The types of verbs -and their specificity- used in the ancillary clause vary depending on the functions and meanings of the absentee. However, the use of the verb thõn ‘to be inside’ in the ancillary caritive clause appears to be predominant and extends to unexpected semantic contexts, signaling a possible grammaticalization process of this verb in caritive expressions.

A pan-dialectal survey of the Horpa preinitial systems

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents a pan-dialectal synchronic survey and documentation of preinitials in the Horpa cluster (West Gyalrongic). Based on fieldwork and analysis of earlier Horpa scholarship, the study not only describes the preinitial systems of ten Horpa varieties covering all proposed branches of the Horpa cluster of West Gyalrongic, but it also identifies four key parameters of variation in the preinitial systems, namely the presence or absence of 1. guttural, 2. sigmatic, and 3. liquid contrasts in addition to the presence and absence of 4. weakened semivowel preinitials. The study contributes to the ongoing documentation and analysis of Horpa varieties, many of which are now endangered. Due to the phonological conservatism of the Gyalrongic languages, the Horpa preinitialed consonant clusters have the potential to offer insights and new perspectives for the investigation of Sino-Tibetan diachronic phonology.

Twenty years of Himalayan Linguistics

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This issue of Himalayan Linguistics marks twenty years for the journal. We reflect on the early history of Himalayan Linguistics, its contribution to the field, and the future of the journal.

Facts and attitudes: on the so-called ‘factual’ markers of the modern Tibetic languages [HL ARCHIVE 14]

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The evidential or egophoric systems of various modern Tibetic languages are described as containing a ‘factual’ copula and a complex ‘factual’ existential, in opposition to the egophoric copula yin and the egophoric existential linking verb yod, e.g., Central and East Tibetan red and yod.red. Other descriptive terms are ‘assertive’ or ‘statemental’. These two markers are also described as being ‘neutral’, falling thus outside the ‘evidential’ system. In my opinion, the terms ‘actual’ and ‘neutral’ are not very well defined. They are used as cover terms for various functions, such as referring to generic facts and shared or shareable knowledge, as indicating inferences and assumptions, even as describing mere hypothetical situations, as expressing or highlightening the speaker’s non-involvement, or for other socio-pragmatic strategies. The terminological choice poses quite some problems, both with respect to the crosslinguistic use of ‘factual’ in the sense of realis mood (as opposed...

Beyond evidentiality, the case of Ladakhi inok & siblings [HL Archive 13]

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The crosslinguistic concept of evidentiality, discriminating between direct and indirect knowledge, does not account for the Tibetic system, where the domain of direct is split up between external direct knowledge, based on immediate sense perception, and internal direct knowledge, based on acquaintance, control/ volition, responsibility, and/ or authority or engagement. With the so-called ‘factual’ auxiliary red, several Tibetic languages also differentiate assertions, which are said to be neutral with respect to evidentiality. Ladakhi does not seem to have a corresponding counterpart. However, many instances of red can be directly translated by the compound auxiliary inok of the Central Ladakhi dialects and its siblings ɦinak, ɦindak, ɦinɖak, and intsuk elsewhere. The opposite, however, is not true. inok & Cie. do not present events neutrally, but express a speaker’s attitude towards the...

Barbara (“Barb”) Frances Kelly: January 24, 1968-December 14, 2022

Sat, 9 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This memoriam honors Barbara Frances Kelly, our friend and colleague, who passed away on 14 December, 2022.

Thadou morphophonemics

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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...

Possessive prefixes in Proto-Kusunda

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Three varieties of Kusunda, a moribund language isolate of Nepal, have been recorded in existing literature; in Hodgson (1857), in Reinhard & Toba (1970), and in several recent publications analyzing material elicited from the language’s last two fluent speakers, Gyani Maiya Sen and Kamala Khatri. Each of these varieties exhibits a set of unique phonological and morphological innovations from their latest common ancestor, Proto-Kusunda (PK). This paper seeks to reconstruct the prefixing possessive marking system of PK, using morphological evidence from the 3 attested varieties. Proto-Kusunda is found to have exhibited obligatory possessive marking on a set of inalienably possessed nouns. Possessed nouns were marked with 2 sets of preposed affixes: *t- *n- *g-, which indexed the person of the noun’s possessor, and *-i- *-a- *-u- *-ja-, a set of derivational prefixes which categorized possessed nominals into a number of semantic fields. The formal and functional characteristics...

Nominalization in Biate

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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...

An overview of Pangkhua: A South Central Tibeto-Burman (Kuki-Chin) language of Bangladesh

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Expressing inner sensations in Denjongke: A contrast with the general Tibetic pattern

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Denjongke is atypical within Tibetic languages in how speaker’s inner sensations such as hunger, cold, feeling of illness and emotions are expressed. Whereas most other Tibetic languages use a sensorial evidential form in default expressions of speaker’s inner sensations (Tournadre 2021, 2023 preprint), Denjongke uses a variety of other forms. The sensorial forms may also be used when the speaker takes an outsider's perspective on their inner sensations in contexts such as surprise and sudden discovery. The reason why Denjongke, unlike Common Tibetan and some other Tibetic languages, can use personal forms for expressing the speaker’s inner sensations is that Denjongke personal forms are not associated with volitionality, whereas the personal/egophoric forms of Common Tibetan and some other Tibetic languages are strongly associated with volitionality.

A preliminary study of Sherdukpen phonology

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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 a description of the segmental inventories and the syllable structure of Sherdukpen. The consonant inventory consists of 23 consonants. Twelve of them are plosives, six fricatives, three approximants, three nasals and a trill. There are three series of stops: voiced, voiceless and voiceless aspirated. Sherdukpen has twenty two vowels among which five of them are nasal vowels five are secondary and one nasal secondary vowels.

A corpus-based study of cassifiers and measure words in Khortha

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract

Areal patterns of numeral classifiers have been studied in several Asian languages for a long time. Emeneau (1956) was probably the first work that focused on the distribution of classifiers for defining India as a ‘linguistic area’. Although classifiers (except some ‘measure words’) are virtually absent in western Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, they are extremely common in a number of Eastern Indo-Aryan languages. There are several studies on the classifier systems of Bengali, Assamese, Maithili and so on. But as yet there has been no study on Khortha, an eastern Indo-Aryan language that also has several classifiers. Some of these classifiers are borrowed from neighboring Munda (Austro-Asiatic) languages because of the prolonged contact between Indo-Aryan and Austro-Asiatic speakers in the eastern part of India. The classifier phenomenon in Khortha and Austro-Asiatic may profitably be seen as being part of a wider areal context, one that...

The grammar and meaning of atemporal complement clauses in Assamese: A cognitive linguistics approach

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The current paper is an attempt at a study of the grammar and meaning of atemporal complement clauses in Assamese from a Cognitive linguistics point of view. Assamese is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Assam, a northeastern province of India. It is the native tongue of the Assamese and is currently spoken by more than twenty million people both as a native tongue and as a link language in the northeastern India.

Grammar, in Cognitive linguistics, is not independent of meaning, rather any grammatical form is motivated by its underlying semantics, i.e. how the event or the situation is construed by the speaker. Thus, depending on the construal involved, clausal complementation takes different grammatical forms. One type of clausal complementation is atemporal complementation, traditionally called non-finite complementation. One core dimension that the construal of atemporal complementation is based on is atemporalization, which involves a conceptual shift from the relational...

Spoken and sung vowels produced by bilingual Nepali speakers: A brief comparison

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Speech and singing both make use of the same vocal apparatus, but studies analyzing the formant frequencies of spoken and sung vowels produced by the same subject generally show a difference in vowel quality as a result of articulatory modifications. Though such modifications may be codified and systematized in traditional musical styles, which place special emphasis on pedagogy, they appear more arbitrary in contemporary genres, which are usually passed down from mentors to students as aural traditions. While multiple studies have been conducted on the effects of singing on vowel space in various languages, this study is the first of its kind to take a look at such effects with reference to Nepalese pop rock. Since this study deals with bilingual speakers, the spoken vowels here have been compared with their sung counterparts only after establishing some deviations from those produced by monolingual speakers as referenced in previous phonetic studies of the language. This...

A Khowar-English glossary [HL Archive 12]

Sat, 5 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a roman-based Khowar-English vocabulary/glossary/dictionary which I have chosen to call "glossary" since it makes no claim to completeness. It includes contextual and cultural notes when such information was supplied by the people who contributed to it. Each entry consists of a headword, English gloss or definition, and sources. Many entries include example sentences with English translations, derivational notes, or etymological notes. Sources for each entry (the persons who have contributed the item) are given for each entry.

The two main target audiences for this work are speakers of Khowar and all kinds of linguists.

Case Marking in Lotha

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Case in Lotha, (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Wokha District of Nagaland) is marked by suffixes that appear to the right of the noun it marks. In Lotha the ergative marker can combine with both nouns and pronouns, however, the nominative markers can only occur with pronouns. Lotha has aspectual split ergativity in which word class (noun vs. pronoun), aspect, and tense are determining factors. The ergative marker occurs mainly with the A argument of a transitive clause when it is in the past and the future. However, a highly volitional or powerful S may receive ergative marking as well. So, in Lotha, the A argument NP is generally marked distinctly from the S argument or O argument. The nominative markers occur in perfective and imperfective clauses marking the A argument (transitive) and S argument (intransitive). The nominative markers take different shapes on pronominals where, ‑j ɔ marks exclusively first person singular, ‑n ...

A field report on Kongai language from Manipur, India

Tue, 3 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This contribution introduces Kongai, a hitherto unreported Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Manipur, North-East India. This field report contains introductory sociolinguistic notes and preliminary information on Kongai phonological properties, such as syllable structure, rhymes, and prefixes. Additional linguistic data include the pronominal paradigm, comparative lexical materials, and a 100-items Swadesh wordlist.

Issues of Lexicon in South-Central Tibeto-Burman (Kuki-Chin)