Kusunda (language)

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Kusunda

Spoken in

Nepal
speaker 100-200
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639-3

kgg

Kusunda is the language of the Kusunda , an ethnic group in Nepal with between 100 and 200 members.

Kusunda was previously classified as belonging to Tibeto-Burmese , but is now mostly viewed as isolated and a remnant of an ancient language family that was native to the area before the advance of Tibeto-Burmese. Recently, DE Watters et al. discovered some young native speakers of this endangered language and wrote more about this otherwise poorly documented language like Nahali .

As long as this poor documentation of Kusunda continues as a language, it will, like other languages ​​that have recently been pushed back to residual areas of Eurasia (e.g. Nahali and Burushaski south of the Himalayas ), probably not be classified as an adequate language. However, due to linguistic and ethnographic-historical considerations, there are not yet sufficiently confirmed hypotheses of a genetic relationship with the Kalto (or Nahali ) as part of an "Indo-Pacific" substrate (as a provisional area designation for a language group before the expansion of the expansive language families) due to the remoteness South Asia and delimited from the likewise recessive Dravidian).

When considering the linguistic connection of Kusunda, it should be taken into account that, in contrast to the heavily researched Indo-European or the languages ​​of the northern part of Eurasia, large Southeast Asian language families such as Sino-Tibetan or Tibeto-Burmese have only recently had recognized reconstructions of the common proto-language. Subgroups are still based heavily on convention rather than detailed language comparisons. Other languages ​​with a small number of speakers in the Himalayas and in back India are still slipped into neighboring language families without any completely convincing evidence of their genetic relationship.

further reading

  • BK Rana: Additional Data and Analysis on Kusunda . Mother Tongue X, 2005
  • Johan Reinhard, Sueyoshi Toba: A preliminary linguistic analysis and vocabulary of the Kusunda language . Summer Institute of Linguistics and Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, 1970
  • Sueyoshi Toba: The Kusunda language revisited after 30 years . Journal of Nationalities of Nepal 3 (5), 2000, pp. 92–94,
  • Sueyoshi Toba: Kusunda wordlists viewed diachronically . Journal of Nationalities of Nepal 3 (5), 2000, pp. 87-91.
  • David E. Watters: Notes on Kusunda Grammar. A Language isolate of Nepal. (pdf, 911 kB) In: Himalayan Linguistics Archive 3. 2006, pp. 1–182 , archived from the original on June 22, 2010 (English, abstract ( memento of April 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive )).;
  • Paul Whitehouse: External Relations of Nihali and Kusunda . In: Mother Tongue III, 1997
  • Paul Whitehouse, Timothy Usher, Merritt Ruhlen , William S.-Y. Wang: Kusunda: An Indo-Pacific language in Nepal. In: PNAS 101: 5692-5695. April 13, 2004 (English, freely accessible).;

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