Khasi language

Spoken in

• Austro Asian Mon-Khmer Khasi

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Kha

Kha

Khasi is the language of the people of the matrilineal Khasi, which lives mainly in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya. It belongs to the group of Mon-Khmer languages ​​within the Austro-Asiatic language family, and is written in the Latin alphabet with some special characters.

Khasi is spoken by about 1.2 million people. Main distribution area of language is Meghalaya, significant minorities of Khasi speakers live in the adjacent parts of Bangladesh and Assam. In Meghalaya Khasi has since the adoption of the Meghalaya State Language Act in 2005, the status of an associate official language.

The modern standard language is based on the languages ​​spoken in and around the town of Cherrapunji dialect. Some of the many other, partly outlying dialects it is probably because the independent Mon-Khmer languages ​​, however, are to no adequate scientific evidence.

Language development

A written language there is only since the mid-19th century, when the Welsh missionary, Thomas Jones introduced the Latin alphabet. As a result, similar to the spelling of the Welsh language. Previously, there were only isolated attempts to write in Khasi Bengali font. Today is a vibrant language Khasi both in written and spoken form. Since the late 19th century, a literary tradition has emerged. In Meghalaya several newspapers are published in Khasi, and there are radio stations and two television stations that broadcast exclusively on Khasi.

Vocabulary

The majority of the vocabulary is of native origin, although it has certainly been some two-way voice contact with neighboring Tibeto - Burmese languages. However, Khasi has borrowed a large number of words from the Bengali, Hindi and English, with English words are usually consistently adapted in recent times its own orthography.

Grammar

The most striking feature of the Khasi is its ability to form grammatical relations to be used almost exclusively prefixes, prepositions and free morphemes. Both suffixes as well as occurring in other Mon-Khmer languages ​​infixes are unknown.

The two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine are, in nouns, adjectives and verbs marked by trailing free syllables, similar to how certain products work for nouns. The syllable i is used to form the diminutive. The plural is formed by prefixing for all genders of ki. The diminutive and Pluralmorpheme be repeated before verbs and adjectives.

To form indeterminate forms, Genusmarkierer and the number word wei ( one) are connected. Then still the Genusmarkierer must be repeated.

Accusative, dative and genitive are formed by prepositions, being placed after the property when the owner of the genitive.

The grammatical categories of verbs are distinguished partly by items placed before the verb syllables, for example, la la lah for the past tense or the past perfect tense, partly by prefixes, such pyn - for causative.

The word order is always subject, predicate, object, both in propositional and question sets that differ only by the tone.