Bahing language
| Bahing | |
|---|---|
| Region | Okhaldhunga district, Nepal |
Native speakers | 12,000 (2011 census)[1] |
|
Sino-Tibetan
| |
| Official status | |
Official language in | Nepal |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
bhj |
| Glottolog |
bahi1252[2] |
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.[3] It belongs to the family of Kiranti languages, a subgroup of Sino-Tibetan.
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
- ↑ Bahing at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Bahing". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- ↑ 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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