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Language Information

Assamese is spoken in eastemmost India, in the state of Assam which borders Burma and China. Though it is spoken by only 15 million people (less than 2 percent of India's population), it is one of the constitutionally recognized languages of the country. Assamese is one of the Indic languages and is thus a member of the Indo-European family. Its alphabet is similar to that of Bengali, with slightly different characters for the letters r and w. Assamese, by contrast, shares with English the unusual feature of Alveolar consonants (English T,D): these are formed when the tongue touches the alveolar ridge above the upper teeth.

Family: Indo-European
Subgroup: Indo-Iranian
Branch: Indic

Writing Sample

Translation

Assamese is a very ancient language with a long tradition behind it. Hieun-Ts'ang, the great Chinese traveler of the 7th century A.D., made mention of its distinctiveness in an indirect way. He wrote, "The language of Kamarupa," i.e., modern Assam, "differs a little from that of mid-India." This means that Assamese, which is derived from the Old Indo-Aryan language, acquired its distinctive shape and form in that distant past, maybe even long before that time, through the influence of the local non-Aryan languages surrounding it.