Bahing language
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| Bahing | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Okhaldhunga district, Nepal | |
| Total speakers: | 2,765 in Nepal (2001 census) | |
| Language family: | Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman Himalayish Mahakiranti Kham-Magar-Chepang-Sunwari Sunwari Bahing |
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| Official status | ||
| Official language of: | Nepal | |
| Regulated by: | no official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | sit | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: | bhj
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Bahing (also known as Rumdali) is a language spoken by 2,765 people (2001 census) of the Bahing ethnic group in the Okhaldhunga district of Nepal and belongs to the family of Kiranti languages, a subgroup of Tibeto-Burman.
The Bahing language was described by Brian Houghton Hodgson (1857, 1858) as having a very complex verbal morphology. By the 1970s, only vestiges were left, making Bahing a case study of grammatical attrition and language death.
Bahing and the related Khaling language have synchronic ten-vowel systems[1]. The difference of [mərə] "monkey" vs. [mɯrɯ] "man" is difficult to perceive for speakers of even neighboring dialects, which makes for "an unlimited source of fun to the Bahing people" (de Boer 2002).
Hodgson (1857) reported a middle voice formed by a suffix -s(i) added to the verbal stem, corresponding to reflexives in other Kiranti languages [2].
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