Angami, also known as Tenyidie, is a

Naga language The Naga languages are a geographic and ethnic grouping of Tibeto-Burman, spoken mostly by Naga peoples. Konyak languages, Northern Naga languages do not fall within the group, in spite of being spoken by Naga groups; instead, these form part ...

spoken in the Naga Hills in the northeastern part of

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

, in Kohima district,

Nagaland Nagaland () is a States and union territories of India, state in the northeast India, north-eastern region of India. It is bordered by the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh to the north, Assam to the west, Manipur to the south, and the Naga Sel ...

. In 2011, there is an estimate of 153,000 first language (L1) Angami speakers. Under the UNESCO's Language Vitality and Endangerment framework, Angami is at the level of "vulnerable", meaning that it is still spoken by most children, but "may be restricted to certain domains".

Phonology

Consonants

This table represents the consonantal structure of the Khonoma dialect. Other dialects also contrast . only occurs as an allophone of . The velar fricative is in free variation with . The post-alveolar approximants are truly

retroflex A retroflex () or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...

(sub-apical) before mid and low vowels, but

laminal A laminal consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue, in contact with upper lip, teeth, alveolar ridge, to possibly, ...

before high vowels (). Angami voiceless nasals are unusual in that, unlike the voiceless nasals of Burmese, they have a positive rather than negative

voice onset time In phonetics, voice onset time (VOT) is a feature of the production of stop consonants. It is defined as the length of time that passes between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing, the vibration of the vocal folds, or, accor ...

—that is, they are aspirated rather than partially voiced. The same is true of the laterals. In both cases, the aspiration has the formants characteristic of Angami ''h,'' which is somewhat velar in pronunciation. The other voiceless approximants may not be aspirated, as the h-like formants occur during the entire hold of the consonant.

Vowels

The following are the vowels of the Khonoma dialect. The labial and labialized consonants have labiodental affricate allophones before (but not in consonant clusters). In addition, about half the time, the rhotic becomes syllabic (a rhotic vowel) in this environment: Angami syllables may be of the form V, CV, or . Attested clusters are .

Phonological reconstruction

Meyase (2023) recognizes southern, northern, and western dialects of Angami, including the following. *Southern: Jokha, Kiwe *Northern: Kewhi *Western: Khwüno Preliminary Proto-Tenyi lexical reconstructions by Meyase (2023), with supporting data from four Tenyidie dialects, are as follows. Northern sound change innovations include: * *kw > pf, f * *o > uo, io Southern sound change innovations include: * *pe- > me-

Grammar and lexicon

A wealth of Angami grammars, lexicons are available in Tenyidie and in English. However, these collections often conflict in their analysis of the phonemic or syntactic nature of the language. This is due to the difference at the time of the documentation, and the choice of informants from varying dialect. Especially in the earlier language documentations (1870s–1960s), mostly by Christian missionary; their informants' meta-data were not specified and any dialect of Angami were assumed to be the "standard" of Angami within the Nagaland region. The Angami-English Phrasebook and Angami-English-Hindi dictionary available online.

Text collection

The complete Tenyidie bible was published in 1970. However, only the translated chapter of Genesis from the bible was posted on the internet under The Rosetta Project. Also, Christian devotional materials such as The Bible...Basically® in Tenyidie are also available online. Another source of text is largely from the ethnic folktales (e.g. Angami Naga folklore by Sekhose, 1970) and especially from song lyrics written in Tenyidie. Other than Christian songs written by the Angami church community (e.g. Shieshülie songbook by Baptist Revival Church), the rising rock music culture started to stir in the Nagaland as the music events and societies like the Hornbill National Rock Contest The next largest source of Tenyidie is the educational materials used in the Kohima schools and university. Although much of these texts are in printed forms, a query on the web does retrieve some Indian exams papers that contain test questions on Tenyidie.

References

Bibliography

Notes

External links

Khonama materials at UCLA

Angami Language Intro
{{Languages of Northeast India Angami–Pochuri languages Languages of Nagaland Endangered languages of India

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...