endonym
An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...
Mihaq ) is a
language isolate
Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The nu ...
spoken by a few among the
Kusunda people The Kusunda or Ban Raja ("people of the forest"), known to themselves as the ''Mihaq'' or ''Myahq'' (< *''Myahak''), are a tribe of former
Nepal
Nepal (; ne, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne,
सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is ma ...
. As of 2022, it only has a single fluent speaker, although there are efforts underway to keep the language alive.
Rediscovery
For decades the Kusunda language was thought to be on the verge of extinction, with little hope of ever knowing it well. The little material that could be gleaned from the memories of former speakers suggested that the language was an isolate, but, without much evidence, it was often classified along with its neighbors as Tibeto-Burman. However in 2004 three Kusundas, Gyani Maya Sen, Prem Bahadur Shahi and Kamala Singh, were brought to
for help with citizenship papers. There, members of Tribhuvan University discovered that one of them, a native of Sakhi VDC in southern Rolpa District, was a fluent speaker of the language. Several of her relatives were also discovered to be fluent. In 2005 there were known to be seven or eight fluent speakers of the language, the youngest in her thirties. However the language is moribund, with no children learning it, since all Kusunda speakers have married outside their ethnicity.
It was presumed that the language became extinct with the death of Rajamama Kusunda on 19 April 2018. However Gyani Maiya Sen and her sister Kamala Kusunda survived him and further data were collected. The sisters, together with author and researcher Uday Raj Aaley, have been teaching the language to interested children and adults.
Aaley, the facilitator and Kusunda-language teacher, has written the book ''Kusunda Tribe and Dictionary''. The book has a compilation of more than 1000 words from the Kusunda language.
Classification
David E. Watters published a mid-sized grammatical description of the language, plus vocabulary ( Watters 2005), although further works have been published since. He argued that Kusunda is indeed a language isolate, not just genealogically but also lexically, grammatically and phonologically distinct from its neighbors. This would imply that Kusunda is a remnant of the languages spoken in northern India before the influx of Tibeto-Burman- and Indo-Iranian-speaking peoples; however it is not classified as a Munda nor a Dravidian language. It thus joins
Burushaski
Burushaski (; ) is a language isolate spoken by Burusho people, who reside almost entirely in northern Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with a few hundred speakers in northern Jammu and Kashmir, India. In Pakistan, Burushaski is spoken by people ...
Vedda language
Vedda is an endangered language that is used by the indigenous Vedda people of Sri Lanka. Additionally, communities such as Coast Veddas and Anuradhapura Veddas who do not strictly identify as Veddas also use words from the Vedda language in pa ...
in the list of South Asian languages that do not fall into the main categories of Indo-European, Dravidian,
Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
, and
Austroasiatic
The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are th ...
.
Before the recent discovery of active Kusunda speakers there had been several attempts to link the language to an established language family. B.K. Rana (2002) maintained that Kusunda was a Tibeto-Burman language as traditionally classified. Merritt Ruhlen argued for a relationship with Juwoi and other Andamanese languages; and for a larger Indo-Pacific language family, with them and other languages, including Nihali.
Others have linked Kusunda to Munda (see Watters 2005); Yeniseian (Gurov 1989);
Burushaski
Burushaski (; ) is a language isolate spoken by Burusho people, who reside almost entirely in northern Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with a few hundred speakers in northern Jammu and Kashmir, India. In Pakistan, Burushaski is spoken by people ...
and Caucasian (Reinhard and Toba 1970; this would be a variant of Gurov's proposal if Sino-Caucasian were accepted); and the Nihali isolate in central India (Fleming 1996, Whitehouse 1997). More recently a relationship between Kusunda, Yeniseian and Burushaski has been proposed.van Driem, George (2014). 'A Prehistoric Thoroughfare between the Ganges and the Himalayas'. In: Jamir, Tiatoshi/Hazarika, Manjil eds 50 Years after Daojali-Hading: Emerging Perspectives in the Archaeology of Northeast India. New Delhi: Research India Press. 60–98.
Phonology
Vowels
Phonetically, Kusunda has six vowels in two
harmonic
A harmonic is a wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the ''fundamental frequency'', the frequency of the original periodic signal, such as a sinusoidal wave. The original signal is also called the ''1st harmonic'', t ...
groups, which are arguably three vowels phonemically: a word will normally have vowels from the upper (pink) or lower (green) set, but not both simultaneously. There are very few words that consistently have either always upper or always lower vowels; most words may be pronounced either way, though those with
uvular consonant
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not p ...
s require the lower set (as in many languages). There are a few words with no uvular consonants that still bar such dual pronunciations, though these generally only feature the distinction in careful enunciation.
Consonants
Kusunda consonants seem to only contrast the active articulator, not where that articulator makes contact. For example, apical consonants may be dental, alveolar, retroflex, or palatal: is dental before , alveolar before , retroflex before , and palatal when there is a following uvular, as in ~ ('we').
In addition, many consonants vary between stops and
fricative
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
s; for instance, seems to surface as between vowels, while surfaces as in the same environment. Aspiration appears to be recent to the language. Kusunda also lacks the
retroflex consonant
A retroflex ( /ˈɹɛtʃɹoːflɛks/), apico-domal ( /əpɪkoːˈdɔmɪnəl/), 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 h ...
phonemes common to the region, and is unique in the region in having
uvular consonant
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not p ...
s.
does not occur initially, and only occurs at the end of a syllable, unlike in neighboring languages. only occurs between vowels; it may be , , .
Pronouns
Kusunda has several cases, marked on nouns and pronouns, three of which are
nominative
In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Eng ...
(Kusunda, unlike its neighbors, has no ergativity),
genitive
In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can a ...
nor
accusative
The accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘ ...
persons
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
.Watters (2005).
Other case suffixes include -ma "together with", -lage "for", -əna "from", -ga, -gə "at, in".
There are also demonstrative pronouns na and ta. Although it is not clear what the difference between them is, it may be
animacy
Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around ...
.
Subjects may be marked on the verb, though when they are they may either be prefixed or suffixed. An example with ''am'' "eat", which is more regular than many verbs, in the present tense (''-ən'') is,
Other verbs may have a prefix ts- in the first person, or zero in the third.
*
* Rana, B.K. ''Significance of Kusundas and their language in the Trans-Himalayan Region''. Mother Tongue. Journal of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory (Boston) IX, 2006, 212-218
* Reinhard, Johan and Sueyoshi Toba. (1970): ''A preliminary linguistic analysis and vocabulary of the Kusunda language''. Summer Institute of Linguistics and Tribhuvan University, Kathmand *
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