Karbi language
Encyclopedia
The Karbí language, also known as Mikir or Arleng, is spoken by the Karbi people of Assam
. It belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, but its position is unclear. Shafer (1974) and Bradley (1997) classify the Mikir languages as an aberrant Kukish branch, but Thurgood (2003) leaves them unclassified within Tibeto-Burman.
There is little dialect diversity except for the Amri
dialect, which is distinct enough to be considered a separate Karbi language.
Like most languages of the hill tribes of the North-east, Karbi does not have its own script and is written in the Roman alphabet, occasionally in Assamese script
. The earliest written texts in Karbi were produced by Christian missionaries, especially the American Baptist Mission and the Catholic Church. The missionaries brought out a newspaper in Karbi titled Birta as early as 1903. Rev. R.E. Neighbor's Vocabulary of English and Mikir, with Illustrative Sentences published in 1878, which can be called the ‘first’ Karbi ‘dictionary’, Sardoka Perrin Kay’s English-Mikir Dictionary published in 1904, Sir Charles Lyall and Edward Stack's The Mikirs in 1908, the first ethnographic details on the Karbis and G.D. Walker's A Dictionary of the Mikir Language published in 1925 are some of the earliest important books on the Karbis and the Karbi language and grammar.
The Karbis have a rich oral tradition. The Mosera ('recalling the past'), a lengthy folk narrative that describes the origin and migration ordeal of the Karbis, is one such example.
Assam
Assam , also, rarely, Assam Valley and formerly the Assam Province , is a northeastern state of India and is one of the most culturally and geographically distinct regions of the country...
. It belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, but its position is unclear. Shafer (1974) and Bradley (1997) classify the Mikir languages as an aberrant Kukish branch, but Thurgood (2003) leaves them unclassified within Tibeto-Burman.
There is little dialect diversity except for the Amri
Amri language
Amri, or Amri Karbi, is spoken by the Karbi people of Assam and Meghalaya. Roman Script is used for institutional practice but it is seen, in various published megagines, that the authors use both Roman Script and Assamese script . Sociolinguistically, it's a variety of the Karbi language, though...
dialect, which is distinct enough to be considered a separate Karbi language.
Like most languages of the hill tribes of the North-east, Karbi does not have its own script and is written in the Roman alphabet, occasionally in Assamese script
Assamese script
The Assamese script is a variant of the Eastern Nagari script also used for Bengali and Bishnupriya Manipuri. The Eastern Nagari script belongs to the Brahmic family of scripts and has a continuous history of development from Nagari script, a precursor of Devanagari...
. The earliest written texts in Karbi were produced by Christian missionaries, especially the American Baptist Mission and the Catholic Church. The missionaries brought out a newspaper in Karbi titled Birta as early as 1903. Rev. R.E. Neighbor's Vocabulary of English and Mikir, with Illustrative Sentences published in 1878, which can be called the ‘first’ Karbi ‘dictionary’, Sardoka Perrin Kay’s English-Mikir Dictionary published in 1904, Sir Charles Lyall and Edward Stack's The Mikirs in 1908, the first ethnographic details on the Karbis and G.D. Walker's A Dictionary of the Mikir Language published in 1925 are some of the earliest important books on the Karbis and the Karbi language and grammar.
The Karbis have a rich oral tradition. The Mosera ('recalling the past'), a lengthy folk narrative that describes the origin and migration ordeal of the Karbis, is one such example.