The Kho-Bwa languages, also known as Bugunish and Kamengic, are a small family of languages spoken in
Arunachal Pradesh
Arunachal Pradesh (, ) is a state in Northeastern India. It was formed from the erstwhile North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) region, and became a state on 20 February 1987. It borders the states of Assam and Nagaland to the south. It shares ...
,
northeast India
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. The name ''Kho-Bwa'' was originally proposed by
George van Driem
George "Sjors" van Driem (born 1957) is a Dutch linguist associated with the University of Bern, where he is the chair of Historical Linguistics and directs the Linguistics Institute.
Education
* Leiden University, 1983–1987 (PhD, ''A Gramma ...
(2001). It is based on the reconstructed words ''*kho'' ("water") and ''*bwa'' ("fire"). Blench (2011) suggests the name ''Kamengic'', from the
Kameng area of Arunachal Pradesh, or alternatively ''Bugun–Mey'', after its two main members. Alternatively, Anderson (2014)
[Anderson, Gregory D.S. 2014. ''On the classification of the Hruso (Aka) language''. Paper presented at the 20th Himalayan Languages Symposium, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.] refers to Kho-Bwa as Northeast Kamengic.
Both Van Driem and Blench group the
''Bugun'' (or ''Khowa''), the
''Mey'' (or ''Sherdukpen''), and the
''Lishpa'' (or ''Lish'') languages.
The
''Puroik'' (or ''Sulung'') language is included in the group by Van Driem but treated as a
language isolate with no genetic relation to Kamengic by Blench.
These languages have traditionally been placed in the
Tibeto-Burman group by the
Linguistic Survey of India
The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) is a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing 364 languages and dialects. The Survey was first proposed by George Abraham Grierson, a member of the Indian Civil Service and a linguist ...
, but the justification of this is open to question.
The languages have certainly been strongly influenced by the neighboring Sino-Tibetan languages, but this does not necessarily imply
genetic unity and may possibly be a purely
areal effect.
[
Blench (2011): "Certainly, the phonology and morphology of Arunachali languages looks superficially like Tibeto-Burman, which explains their placing in the Linguistic Survey of India. Unfortunately, this is rather where matters have remained .. this paperproposes we should take seriously the underlying presumption probably implied in Konow's statement in Linguistic Survey of India. Volume III, 1, Tibeto-Burman family, Calcutta (1909:572)], that these languages may not be Sino-Tibetan but simply have been influenced by it; that they are language isolates."]
The entire language family has about 15,000 speakers (including Puroik) or about 10,000 speakers (excluding Puroik), according to estimates made during the 2000s.
Word lists and sociolinguistic surveys of Kho-Bwa languages have also been conducted by Abraham, et al. (2018).
Classification
The internal structure of the ''Kho-Bwa'' group of languages is as follows.
*
Puroik language, Puroik
*
Bugun (Khowa)
*Western Kho-Bwa
**Mey–Sartang
***
Sherdukpen (Mey, Ngnok), divided into two varieties:
**** Shergaon
**** Rupa
***
Sartang (Bootpa, But Monpa, But Pa, Matchopa), 50%–60% lexical similarity with Mey.
**Chug–Lish
***
Lish (Lish)
***
Chug (Chug Monpa, Chugpa, Monpa), close to Lish
Lieberherr & Bodt (2017)
Lieberherr & Bodt (2017)
[Lieberherr, Ismael; Bodt, Timotheus Adrianus. 2017]
Sub-grouping Kho-Bwa based on shared core vocabulary
In ''Himalayan Linguistics'', 16(2). consider
Puroik language, Puroik to be a Kho-Bwa language, and classify the Kho-Bwa languages as follows.
;Kho-Bwa
*
Puroik language, Puroik
*
Bugun
*Western Kho-Bwa
**
Sherdukpen,
Sartang
**
Chug (Duhumbi),
Lish (Khispi)
Tresoldi et al. (2022)
Based on computational phylogenetic analyses from Tresoldi et al. (2022), the phylogenetic tree of Kho-Bwa is roughly as follows:
*Western
**''Duhumbi–Khispi (Chug–Lish)'':
Duhumbi (Chug),
Khispi (Lish)
**''Mey–Sartang'': Shergaon, Rupa, Jerigaon, Khoina, Rahung, Khoitam
*
Bugun
**A
***Bulu, Rawa, Kojo Rojo
***Sario Saria, Lasumpatte, Chayangtajo
**B
***Namphri, Kaspi
***Wangho, Dikhyang
***Singchaung, Bichom
Vocabulary
The following table of Kho-Bwa basic vocabulary items is from Blench (2015).
[Blench, Roger. 2015]
''The Mey languages and their classification''
Presentation given at the University of Sydney, 21 August 2015.
See also
*
Kho-Bwa comparative vocabulary lists (Wiktionary)
Further reading
* Ismail Lieberherr and Timotheus Adrianus Bodt. (2017) Sub-grouping Kho-Bwa based on shared core vocabulary. Himalayan Linguistics 16(2). 26-63
Paper(CLDF Dataset on Zenodo )
* Binny Abraham, Kara Sako, Elina Kinny, Isapdaile Zeliang (2018). Sociolinguistic Research among Selected Groups in Western Arunachal Pradesh: Highlighting Monpa. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2018-009. (CLDF Dataset on Zenodo. )
* Bodt, T. and J.-M. List (2019). Testing the predictive strength of the comparative method: An ongoing experiment on unattested words in Western Kho-Bwa languages. ''Papers in Historical Phonology'' 4.1. 22-44. (CLDF Dataset on Zenodo )
*
References
* George van Driem (2001) ''Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region.'' Brill.
* Blench, Roger. 2011
''(De)classifying Arunachal languages: Reconsidering the evidence''* Lieberherr, Ismael; Bodt, Timotheus Adrianus. 2017
Sub-grouping Kho-Bwa based on shared core vocabulary In ''Himalayan Linguistics'', 16(2).
*Abraham, Binny, Kara Sako, Elina Kinny, Isapdaile Zeliang. 2018.
Sociolinguistic Research among Selected Groups in Western Arunachal Pradesh: Highlighting Monpa'. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2018-009.
{{Eurasian languages
Languages of India
Proposed language families