The Galo language is a

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. ...

language of the

Tani Tani may refer to: *Tani (letter), a letter in the Georgian scripts *Tani people, a group of tribes in Arunachal Pradesh, India *Tani languages, a group of languages spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, India * Maiani language, also known as Tani, a langu ...

group, spoken by the Galo people. Its precise position within Tani is not yet certain, primarily because of its central location in the Tani area and the strong effects of intra-Tani contacts on the development of Tani languages. It is an endangered language according to the general definitions, but prospects for its survival are better than many similarly-placed languages in the world.

Dialects

The major Galo dialects are Pugo, spoken around the district capital

Aalo Aalo, formerly Along, is a census town and headquarter of the West Siang district district of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. It is located from Likabali, which is at the border of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. It is also an Advance Lan ...

; Lare, spoken to the south of

; and a dialect that can be called Kargu kardi, pertaining to the dialect spoken in the northwest near the Tagin area. There may be additional Galo dialects further north, which remains largely unresearched. There are numerous subdialects that often correspond to regional or clan groupings. Neighbouring languages include

Assamese Assamese may refer to: * Assamese people, a socio-ethnolinguistic identity of north-eastern India * People of Assam, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic and multi-religious people of Assam * Assamese language, one of the easternmost Indo-Aryan language ...

Nepali Nepali or Nepalese may refer to : Concerning Nepal * Anything of, from, or related to Nepal * Nepali people, citizens of Nepal * Nepali language, an Indo-Aryan language found in Nepal, the current official national language and a language spoken ...

Bodo Bodo may refer to: Ethnicity * Boro people, an ethno-linguistic group mainly from Northwest Assam, India * Bodo-Kachari people, an umbrella group from Nepal, India and Bangladesh that includes the Bodo people Culture and language * Boro cu ...

, Mising,

Minyong The Minyong are a sub-group of the Adi people, a tribal people living in Arunachal Pradesh, India. The Minyong are found in East Siang, Siang and West Siang West Siang (Pron:/ˈsjæŋ or ˈsɪæŋ/) is an administrative district in the stat ...

Hills Miri A hill is a landform that extends above the surrounding terrain. It often has a distinct summit. Terminology The distinction between a hill and a mountain is unclear and largely subjective, but a hill is universally considered to be not as ...

, Tagin, Nishi, Bori, Pailibo, Ramo and

Bokar Lhoba (English translation: ; ; bo, ལྷོ་པ།) is any of a diverse amalgamation of Sino-Tibetan-speaking tribespeople living in and around Pemako, a region in southeastern Tibet including Mainling, Medog and Zayü counties of Nying ...

. Post (2007:46) lists a provisional classification of Galo dialects. *Galòo **Karkòo? **Gensìi? **Taíi(podia) ***(branch) ***Zɨrdóo ****(branch) ****Larèe, Puugóo Post (2013) reclassified Karko as a variety of Bori.

Grammar

Like most central and eastern Tani languages, Galo is largely synthetic and

agglutinating An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remai ...

. Two primary lexical tones are present – High and Low – which may reflect two Proto-Tani syllable tones; in modern Galo, the surface TBU (Tone-Bearing Unit) is the usually polysyllabic phonological word. A robust

finite Finite is the opposite of infinite. It may refer to: * Finite number (disambiguation) * Finite set, a set whose cardinality (number of elements) is some natural number * Finite verb Traditionally, a finite verb (from la, fīnītus, past partici ...

/non-finite asymmetry underlies Galo grammar, and clause chaining and

nominalization In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word that is not a noun (e.g., a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase. This change in functional category can occur through morphological tr ...

are both rampant. No synchronic verb-serialization appears to exist, although what seems to have been proto-verb-serialization has developed into a very large and productive system of derivational suffixes to bound verbal roots. Major (non-derived) lexical classes are noun, adjective and verb. Other grammatical features include

postposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

s, relator nouns, classifiers, an extremely large system of aspectual suffixes, and a rich set of constituent-final particles coding functions related to epistemological status (such as evidentiality), discourse/pragmatic status, modality, and other related functions. Case-marking is basically

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 ‘th ...

; ergativity has not been found.

Education

Galo language is taught as third language in schools of areas dominated by Galo community.

Dialects

Grammar

Education

See also

References

Further reading