LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 17:7 July 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
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Vowel Harmony in Chiru

Mechek Sampar Awan, Ph.D. Scholar

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to describe vowel harmony in Chiru. Chiru is an endangered Old Kuki-Chin language of Tibeto-Burman language family (Grierson 1904) spoken by 8599 speakers (Census of India: 2011). Harmony is a term used in phonology to refer to the way the articulation of one phonological unit is influenced by another unit in the same word or phrase (Crystal 1997). An analogous notion is that of assimilation. The two main processes are consonant harmony and vowel harmony. Interestingly vowel harmony is found only in a few languages among Kuki-Chin groups, viz., Biate, Chiru etc. Most of the Kuki-Chin languages like Thadou, do not have vowel harmony. The vowel harmony in Chiru mainly occurs in pronominal prefixes and genitives of the first and third persons, causative prefixes, numeral prefixes and a few disyllabic words. This phonological process in Chiru is due to the regressive assimilation of vowels in which the vowel phoneme in the first syllable is influenced by the vowel phoneme in the following syllable to become identical to each other in a word.

Keywords: Chiru, Kuki-Chin, Vowel harmony

Introduction

Chiru, the language spoken by the Chiru people, belongs to the Old Kuki-Chin group of Tibeto-Burman language family (G.A. Grierson 1904). Chiru is one of the thirty-three recognised tribal languages of Manipur. The total population of Chiru speakers is only 8599 (census of India: 2011). The language has close affinities with other Kuki-Chin languages, viz., Ranglong, Aimol, Kom, Chorei, Darlong, Hrangkhol, Sakachep, etc. The native speakers of Chiru settle in 12 villages situated in Kangpokpi, Tamenglong and Churachandpur districts of Manipur and 1 village in Cachar district of Assam. Since the Chiru people settle in different locations of Manipur and Assam and their villages are a distant apart from one another, the Chiru speakers of one village are not in frequent contact with the Chiru speakers of the other villages. Rather, they are more frequently in contact with the speakers of other languages settling in their respective neighbouring villages. This may eventually lead to a great variation in the language spoken by the native speakers from one village to another. Moreover, it is evident that there are some borrowed words from words from other languages which have replaced the original terms in Chiru. Therefore, the documentation and description of the language are highly required to preserve the language.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Mechek Sampar Awan, Ph.D. Scholar
Department of Linguistics
Assam University
Silchar-788011
Assam
India
awanms3@gmail.com

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