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
Official status
Official language in:	Nepal
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`sit`
ISO 639-3:	`bhj`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

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].