Assamese language

Assamese (অসমীয়া) or Ôxômiya (IPA ^*) is the language spoken by some of the natives of 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 eastern most of Indo-European languages, it is spoken by over 20 million people.

The word Assamese is an English one, built on the same principle as Cingalese, Canarese, 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 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 ^*.

In IPA Transcription

**Vowels**
	Front	Central	Back
High
High-mid
Low-mid
Low

**Consonants**
	Labial	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Voiceless stops
Voiced stops
Voiceless fricatives
Voiced fricatives
Nasals
Approximants		,

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.

**Vowels**
	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
High-mid	e		o
Low-mid	ê		ô
Low		a	å

**Consonants**
	Labial	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
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 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,historically derived from what used to be coronal sibilants. The derivation of the velar fricative from the coronal sibilant ^*" target="_blank" >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 a voiceless uvular fricative ^* 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 and its back rounded counterpart å ^*" target="_blank" > is unique in this branch of the language family, and sounds very much to foreigners as something between ^*." target="_blank" >It is used in many dialects of British English, including Received Pronunciation, as in the word English). This vowel is found in Assamese words such as påt [" target="_blank" >^* "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 ^* (Moral 1992Moral, Dipankar. A phonology of Asamiya Dialects : Contemporary Standard and Mayong, PhD Thesis, Deccan College, Pune 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 group spoken in undivided Kamrup, Nalbari, Barpeta, Darrang, Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon districts
Goalparia group spoken in Goalpara, Dhubri, Kokrajhar and Bongaigoan districts

History

The history of the Assamese language may be broadly divided into three periods:

Early Assamese (6th to 15th century AD)

The Charyapadas are often cited as the earliest example of Assamese literature. The Charyapadas are Buddhist songs composed in 8th-12th century. These writings bear similarities to Oriya and Bengali languages as well. The phonological and morphological traits of these songs bear very strong resemblance to Assamese some of which are extant.

After the Charyapadas, the period may again be split into (a) Pre-Vaishnavite and (b) Vaishnative sub-periods. The earliest known Assamese writer is Hema Saraswati, who wrote a small poem "Prahrada Charita". In the time of the King Indranarayana (1350-1365) of Kamatapur the two poets Harihara Vipra and Kaviratna Saraswati composed Asvamedha Parva and Jayadratha Vadha respectively. Another poet named Rudra Kandali translated Drona Parva into Assamese. But the most well-known poet of the Pre-Vaishnavite sub period is Madhav Kandali, who rendered Valmiki's Ramayana into Assamese verse (Kotha Ramayana, 14th century) under the patronage of Mahamanikya, a Kachari king of Jayantapura.

Hema Saraswati introduced himself in his writing as Vaishnava born in Kamrup or Kamarupa. The language he used is not Assamese but Kamrupi, this is the case with Madhava Kandali too. The biggest corpus of work in this period comes from Srimanta Sankardev.

Middle Assamese (17th to 19th Century AD)

This is a period of the prose chronicles (Buranji) of the Ahom court. The Ahoms had brought with them an instinct for historical writings. In the Ahom court, historical chronicles were at first composed in their original Tibeto-Chinese language, but when the Ahom rulers adopted Assamese as the court language, historical chronicles began to be written in Assamese. From the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards, court chronicles were written in large numbers. These chronicles or buranjis, as they were called by the Ahoms, broke away from the style of the religious writers. The language is essentially modern except for slight alterations in grammar and spelling.

Modern Assamese

Influence of Missionaries

The modern Assamese period began with the publication of the Bible in Assamese prose by the American Baptist Missionaries in 1819. The currently prevalent standard Asamiya has its roots in the Sibsagar dialect of Eastern Assam. As mentioned in Bani Kanta Kakati's "Assamese, its Formation and Development" (1941, Published by Sree Khagendra Narayan Dutta Baruah, LBS Publications, G.N. Bordoloi Road, Gauhati-1, Assam, India) – " The Missionaries made Sibsagar in Eastern Assam the centre of their activities and used the dialect of Sibsagar for their literary purposes". The American Baptist Missionaries were the first to use this dialect in translating the Bible in 1813. These Missionaries established the first printing press in Sibsagar in 1836 and started using the local Asamiya dialect for writing purposes. In 1846 they started a monthly periodical called Arunodoi, and in 1848, Nathan Brown published the first book on Assamese Grammar. The Missionaries published the first Assamese-English Dictionary compiled by M. Bronson in 1867.

Effect of British rule

The British imposed Bengali in Assam after the state was occupied in 1826. Due to a sustained campaign, Assamese was reinstated in 1872 as the state language. Since the initial printing and literary activity occurred in eastern Assam, the Eastern dialect was introduced in schools, courts and offices and soon came to be formally recognized as the Standard Assamese. In recent times, with the growth of Guwahati as the political and commercial center of Assam, the Standard Assamese has moved away from its roots in the Eastern dialect.

Beginning of Modern Literature

The period of modern literature began with the publication the Assamese journal Jonaki (1889), which introduced the short story form first by Laxminath Bezbarua. Thus began the Jonaki period of Assamese literature. In 1894 Rajanikanta Bordoloi published the first Assamese novel Mirijiyori. The modern Assamese literature has been enriched by the works of Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla, Hem Barua and others.

In 1917 the Asom Sahitya Sabha was formed as a guardian of the Assamese society and the forum for the development of Assamese language and literature.

References

External links

Indo-Aryan languages | Languages of India | Languages of Bangladesh | Assam

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