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Assamese (অসমীয়া) or Asamiya is the language spoken by some of the natives of the state of Assam in northeast India. It is also the official language of Assam. It is spoken in parts of Arunachal Pradesh and other northeast Indian states. Small pockets of Assamese speakers can be found in Bhutan and Bangladesh. Immigrants from Assam have carried the language with them to other parts of the world. The eastern most of Indo-European languages, it is spoken by over 20 million people.
Formation of Assamese
The language descends from classical Sanskrit via the eastern branch of Prakrit. Assamese, along with Oriya and Bengali, is believed to have developed from Magahi apabhramsa . Written records relating to Assamese language can be traced to 6th/7th century AD when Kamarupa (the ancient name of Assam) was ruled by the Varman dynasty. Since then over the passage of the centuries it has been influenced by the languages and dialects of tribes that migrated from south eastern parts of Asia. Among these, primarily it was the Ahom tribe, that ruled eastern part of present Assam for over 600 years until 1824 AD. Other big tribes like the Boro's and the Kachari's have also lent charm to the language.
Writing
There is a strong tradition of Kamrupi writing from early times which is now called Assamese. Assam had its own system of writing on the bark of the saashi tree. The Assamese script derives its ancestry to Nagari, an earlier form of Devanagari script which is used in India's national language Hindi. The script is very similar to Bengali script with some minor differences. The spellings in Assamese are not necessarily phonetic. Hemkosh, the first Assamese dictionary introduced spellings based on Sanskrit which are now the standard.
Phonetics
Assamese phonetics has two distinguishing features vis-a-vis the other Indic languages of the Indo-European family. The complete absence of the retroflex sound which is particularly strong in Dravidian languages, and strong in Sanskrit; and the presence of the voiceless velar fricative which is completely absent in other Indian languages. As an example of the second, some Assamese murukh prefer Oxomiya to Asomiya while writing the name of their language to denote the sound, represented by 'x' in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The same murukh however would not write their own name using 'x' e.g., Satyajit would not write Xatyajit and Sujal would not write Xujal - thus they are classified murukh. The classified murukh are mostly English medium produce who would 99% cases not teach Assamese, or in murukh term ox-miya, to their children.
Dialects
The Assamese spoken in and around Guwahati is now considered standard, however, the language landscape is as follows:
- Ahomese, now called Assamese, spoken in old Ahom kingdom around Sibsagar district
- Ahomese dialect spoken in present Nagaon district and adjoining areas of Ahom kingdom
- Kamrupi spoken in un-divided Kamrup and Darang - all yester year scholars were born in Kamrup or otherwise educated in Kamrup
- Goalparia spoken in Goalpara and Dhubri districts
It is not surprising that Guwahati is situated geographically between regions that speak Kamrupi and Ahomese.
History
The history of the Assamese language may be broadly divided into three periods:
Early Assamese (6th to 15th century AD)
This period may again be split into (a) Pre–Vaishnavite and (b) Vaishnative sub-periods. The earliest known Assamese writer is Hema Saraswati, who wrote a small poem "Prahrada Charita". In the time of the king Indranarayana (1350-1365) of Kamatapur the two poets Harihara Vipra and Kaviratna Saraswati composed Asvamedha Parva and Jayadratha Vadha respectively. Another poet named Rudra Kandali translated Drona Parva into Assamese. But the most well-known poet of the Pre-Vaishnavite sub period is Madhava Kandali, who rendered the entire Ramayana into Assamese verse under the patronage of Mahamanikya, a Kachari king of Jayantapura.
Hema Saraswati introduced himself in his writing as Vaishnava. The language he used is not commarable to Assamese but Kamrupi.
Middle Assamese (17th to 19th Century AD)
This is a period of the prose chronicles (Buranji) of the Ahom court. The Ahoms had brought with them an instinct for historical writings. In the Ahom court, historical chronicles were at first composed in their original Tibeto-Chinese language, but when the Ahom rulers adopted Assamese as the court language, historical chronicles began to be written in Assamese. From the beginning of the seventeenth century
onwards, court chronicles were written in large numbers. These chronicles or buranjis, as they were called by the Ahoms, broke away from the style of the religious writers. The language is essentially modern except for slight alterations in grammar and spelling.
Modern Assamese
Influence of Missionaries
The modern Assamese period began with the publication of the Bible in Assamese prose by the American Baptist Missionaries in 1819. The currently prevalent standard Asamiya has its roots in the Sibsagar dialect of Eastern Assam. As mentioned in Bani Kanta Kakati's "Assamese, its Formation and Development" (1941, Published by Sree Khagendra Narayan Dutta Baruah, LBS Publications, G.N. Bordoloi Road, Gauhati-1, Assam, India) – " The Missionaries made Sibsagar in Eastern Assam the centre of their activities and used the dialect of Sibsagar for their literary purposes". The American Baptist Missionaries were the first to use this dialect in translating the Bible in 1813. These Missionaries established the first printing press in Sibsagar in 1836 and started using the local Asamiya dialect for writing purposes. In 1846 they started a monthly periodical called Arunodoi, and in 1848, Nathan Brown published the first book on Assamese Grammar. The Missionaries published the first Assamese-English Dictionary compiled by M. Bronson in 1867.
Effect of British rule
The British imposed Bengali in Assam after the state was occupied in 1826. Due to a sustained campaign, Assamese was reinstated in 1872 as the state language. Since the initial printing and literary activity occurred in eastern Assam, the Eastern dialect was introduced in schools, courts and offices and soon came to be formally recognized as the Standard Assamese. In recent times, with the growth of Guwahati as the political and commercial center of Assam, the Standard Assamese has moved away from its roots in the Eastern dialect.
Beginning of Modern Literature
The period of modern literature began with the publication the Assamese journal Jonaki (1889), which introduced the short story form first by Laxminath Bezbarua. Thus began the Jonaki period of Assamese literature. In 1894 Rajanikanta Bordoloi published the first Assamese novel Mirijiyori.
The modern Assamese literature has been enriched by the works of Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla, Hem Barua and others.
In 1917 the Asom Sahitya Sabha was formed as a guardian of the Assamese society and the forum for the development of Assamese language and literature.
The word Assamese is an English one, built on the same principle as Cingalese, Canarese, etc. It is based on the English word Assam by which the tract consisting of the Brahmaputra valley is known. But the people themselves call their state Asam and their language Asamiya.
ISO 639-1: as
ISO 639-2: asm
External links
Wikipedia articles written in this language are located at the
Assamese language Wikipedia
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