Dhimal (language)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dhimal

Spoken in

Nepal , also India
speaker 18,000
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

sit

ISO 639-3

dhi

Dhimal is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by around 17,000 people in Nepal and a few hundred in India .

Together with the toto , Dhimal forms the small genetic unit Dhimal-Toto within the Bodic languages, which are a sub-unit of Sinotibetic.

Geographical distribution and dialects

In Nepal, according to the 2001 census, Dhimal is spoken by a little over 17,000 people in the districts of Jhapa ( Mechi zone ) and Morang ( Koshi zone ) in around 75 villages. The Kankai River forms the border between the Eastern and Western dialects, which share about 80% of the vocabulary. In India, Dhimal is spoken by around 500 people in 16 villages in West Bengal .

Most Dhimal speakers in Nepal are also proficient in Nepali, but only rarely fluently and even more rarely in writing. Dhimal is spoken by all age groups at home and in the villages, and the children grow up with this language. Dhimal was recognized as an official nationality by the Nepalese government.

Linguistic properties

Like almost all Tibetan Burmese languages, Dhimal also has the sentence position SOV (subject-object-verb). The noun comes after its more detailed determiners such as genitive attribute, adjective attribute and number adjectives, post positions are used. Dhimal is not a tonal language .

See also

literature

  • Christopher I. Beckwith (Ed.): Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages. Brill, Leiden / Boston / Cologne 2002.
  • Paul K. Benedict: Sino-Tibetan. A Conspectus. Cambridge University Press, 1972.
  • Scott DeLancey: Sino-Tibetan Languages. In: Bernard Comrie (Ed.): The World's Major Languages. Oxford University Press, 1990.
  • Austin Hale: Research on Tibeto-Burman Languages. Mouton, Berlin / New York / Amsterdam 1982.
  • James A. Matisoff: Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. University of California Press, 2003.
  • Anju Saxena (Ed.): Himalayan Languages. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2004.
  • Graham Thurgood, Randy J. LaPolla: The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Routledge, London 2003.
  • George Van Driem: Languages ​​of the Himalayas. Brill, Leiden 2001.