Introduction

Grammatical descriptions of languages spoken in North East India often rely on the classification and terminology used for the classical Indo-European languages, particularly Latin and Sanskrit. Thus one often reads about ‘Nominative’, ‘Accusative’, ‘Dative’ and so on, regarding languages as widely divergent as those of the Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan and Tai families. While these terms should of course be used when they are appropriate, we suggest that for some languages of the North East they are not, and that more semantically based terms like ‘agentive’ and ‘antiagentive’ should be used.

One of the features of the Latin and Sanskrit systems is that they are systematic: every noun must be marked by one or other of these cases. Words that modify the noun, like adjectives and demonstratives, also get marked. Pronouns are also marked for case, though the form of the marking may differ. At least some of these markers are clearly syntactic in nature: for example, the normative case is used to mark the subject of a sentence. These systems form paradigms that are learned by students as the declensions of Latin and Sanskrit.

Introduction

The Tangsa (Tangshang) people of North East India and Myanmar comprise many sub-tribes, almost all of them having distinctive varieties of oral language and cultural features. The distinctive language varieties are in some cases mutually intelligible, but in other cases they are so divergent as to be unintelligible. The Tangsa have lived and moved about in the Patkai Hills on what is now the India-Myanmar border for a very long time, but in the last several hundred years there has been a progressive movement of Tangsa people down to the plains of Assam from the hills of Burma and Arunachal Pradesh. Since the early twentieth century, there has also been adoption of established world religions, first Buddhism and later Christianity. More recently some Tangsa groups have adopted Rang Fraa (also spelled Rangfra and Rangfrah), a kind of codification of the traditional beliefs supported by Hindu organizations like the Vivekananda Kendra. These changes in recent times have had a big impact on the continuity of their cultural traditions.

In this paper, we would like to explore in detail the social and linguistic background to the Tangsa traditional Wihu song, which exists among the Pangwa (see section 2) subtribes who are now mostly Christian. The Wihu song is sung in different cultural settings, but essentially it is a part of the ritual of praise to the spirit of mother earth (Wihu). There are several styles of Tangsa songs, of which Wihu is one. These styles can share the same content – the same set of words being used in a sacrifice song, a spirit calling song or even a love song (see Morey 2012; Morey and Schöpf in press).

Introduction

Dimasa belongs to the Bodo-Garo group of the Tibeto-Burman language family. An age-old narrative traces the origin and migration of this linguistic sub-group including the Dimasas. N.K. Barman (2007) has documented this age-old narrative, which the Dimasas still believe is one of the oldest sources indicating their first settlement and the subsequent migration (Thaosen 2009). It narrates the migration from their homeland somewhere in Tibet (Barpujari 1997) to the confluence of the rivers Dilao or Dilaobra (Brahmaputra) and Sanggibra (Tsang-po) and further down towards the Sunderbans. The duration of migration from their homeland to the Brahmaputra River Valley was believed to have lasted 500 years and to occur possibly around 1000 BCE. Only a group of Dimasa priests from the clan Jonthai are well-versed and they divinely preserve this age-old narrative. Very few folk epic in Dimasa survive today. They give clues not just about the evolution of the Bodo-Garos but they can also help in reconstructing the proto-forms of the then language Proto-Bodo-Garo. The language of the narrative is in Dimasa although it is not easy to understand for the Dimasa speakers today. The language in the narrative may not be as old as is purported. However, it is definitely not the modern Dimasa language which is spoken today. I will, therefore, use the terms OD (Old Dimasa) for the narrative and compare it with MD (Modern Dimasa) for the present-day Dimasa language.

The age-old folk narrative in Dimasa and the full translation in English have been extracted from N.K. Barman (2007) and linguistically analysed by the author.

Introduction

Purpose and Goals

Language surveys are conducted around the world for a variety of reasons: initial description of so far undocumented languages, assessing the vitality of endangered languages, evaluating differences and similarities of related speech forms, studying people's attitudes about different languages, measuring multilingualism, initiating a language development program etc. The purpose of this sociolinguistic survey was to determine the need for language development in the Koch community of North East India. In order to meet this purpose, several specific goals were set:

1. To clarify the relationship between Koch and Rabha, and to find out the degree of comprehension between them (see section 3, ‘Dialects of the language’).

2. To investigate the patterns of language use in the Koch community as well as attitudes towards their own language and towards other languages spoken in the region; to assess the vitality of the Koch language (see section 4, ‘Language use, attitudes and vitality’).

3. To find out if there are any language development efforts going on in Koch and to determine what variety (if any) is considered to be the best/most suitable for development (see section 4, ‘Language use, attitudes and vitality’). The Koch dialects remain largely undocumented and very much lack written materials; whereas some of the dialects are already endangered.

4. To assess Koch speakers' abilities in a second language (see section 5, ‘Bilingualism’).

Introduction

The term ‘East Bodish’ was first used in Shafer (1954) to identify a proposed family of languages to which Dakpa, a language spoken Southeast of Lhasa, belonged. Shafer (1954) noted that Dakpa, and therefore ‘East Bodish’ languages were closely related to, but not directly descended from Classical Tibetan. Since then, several other languages have been identified as East Bodish. A majority of these languages are found in Bhutan, but some spill over into Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh as well.

The East Bodish languages, in general, are amongst the most poorly described in all of Tibeto-Burman, in particular in comparison to their other Bodic cousins (e.g. Newar, Kiranti languages, Tamang). The studies I am familiar with are presented in §2. Other than van Driem (2007), showing the close relationship between Dakpa and Dzala, there has been no attempt to sort out the relationship amongst the East Bodish languages.

The aim of this chapter is to make new data available while also proposing the first tentative internal phylogeny amongst the languages within East Bodish. In §2 I provide the relevant background on East Bodish languages, including approximate location and number of speakers. §3 presents the data and arguments that confirm van Driem (2007)'s analysis that Dakpa and Dzala form a subgroup within East Bodish. §4 discusses the placement of the dialect of Hengke spoken in Phobikha, called Phobjip, in East Bodish and §5 discusses Chali.

It goes without saying that North East India is one of the most attractive areas on earth in terms of linguistic endeavors. Like its biological diversity, it is a homeland of various ethnic peoples and tribes, as well as their languages, belonging to four broadly-recognized families: Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan, Austro-Asiatic and Tai-Kadai. For the last few decades, western scholars and local Indian scholars have been working on many languages in North East India. Although I am a newcomer in the field of North East Indian Linguistics, I find much research into various languages in the region to be very successful, not to mention the award-winning Grammar of Galo by Mark W. Post. In this sense, I believe that NEILS, where various scholars get together, whether they are highly-accomplished senior scholars or students, provides an excellent forum for presenting the outcomes of linguistic endeavors by foreign and local scholars who work on North East Indian languages, and that it brings a good chemistry to the field. In past NEILS conferences, some Japanese scholars (myself included) participated as well. However, currently there is a relatively small population of Japanese scholars who work on North East Indian languages.

Since the advent of Buddhism in Japan in the eighth century, Sanskrit has been the most studied Indian languages in Japan. In the context of Buddhism, Tibetan and Burmese are also actively studied in Japan. Alongside studies of these two languages, other Tibeto-Burman languages are studied as well, especially those spoken in China and Myanmar.