| Bahing | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Okhaldhunga district, Nepal | |||
| Native speakers | 2,770 (2001 census) | |||
| Language family |
Sino-Tibetan
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| Official status | ||||
| Official language in | Nepal | |||
| Regulated by | No official regulation | |||
| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 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.[1] It 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. 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 PDF).
Hodgson (1857) reported a middle voice formed by a suffix -s(i) added to the verbal stem, corresponding to reflexives in other Kiranti languages (Opgenort.nl).