Bahing language

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Bahing
Region Okhaldhunga district, Nepal
Native speakers
 13,000  (2005)[1]
Official status
Official language in
 Nepal
Language codes
ISO 639-3 bhj

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.[2] 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).

References

  1. ↑ Bahing reference at Ethnologue (17th ed., 2013)
  2. ↑ Detailed language map of eastern Nepal, see language #4 near the map's north/south center and about 2/3 of the way from east to west

External links


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