Gurung
गुरुङ, ཏམུ་ཀི
Tamu Kyi, Manangi, Mustangi and Seke
Native toNepal, India, Bhutan
EthnicityGurung people
Native speakers
325,622 (2011 census)[1]
Khema (Devanagari) and Tibetan
Official status
Official language in
 India
Language codes
ISO 639-3gvr
Glottologguru1261
ELP

Gurung language differs from place to place. Gurung of Nepal not only speak Tamu Kyi but also speaks Manangi, Mustangi and Seke. The total number of all Gurung speakers in Nepal was 227,918 (1991 census). Nepal's official language Nepali, is an Indo-European language, whereas Gurung is a Sino-Tibetan language. Gurung is one of the major languages of Nepal, and is also spoken in India, Bhutan, and by diaspora communities in other countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

Geographical distribution

Gurung is spoken in the following districts of Nepal (Ethnologue):

Classification

At higher levels, Gurung is a member of the Tibeto-Burman (or Trans-Himalayan) family. Based on lexical cognates established by Robert Shafer and updated by George van Driem, Shafer constructed the Bodish sub-grouping into three sub-divisions: Western, Central and Southern (a.k.a. “old Bodish”, including Tibetan), and Eastern (containing “archaic” languages like Mönpa) and mainstream languages.[3][4] Noonan referred to this sub-grouping within Bodish as Manange/Nyeshangte and Nar-Phu and Gurungic (containing Gurung, Thakali and Chantyal).[5] [6] He noted that Chantyal is structurally deviant due to more extensive contact-induced language change from Nepali. Sten Konow classified Himalayan T-B languages into pronominalized and non-prominalized, where Gurung is located.[7] This classification is similar to Voeglin & Voeglin (1965), but within a "Gyarung-Mishmi" sub-family within Sino-Tibetan.[8] Shafer classified Gurung within the Bodic division, sub-grouping that into Bodish and West Central Himalayish. Within the Bodish "Section", he located "Bodish" languages (including the Tibetan varieties) and also the "Gurung Branch", including Gurung, Tamang (Murmi), and Thakali (Thaksya).

Grammar

Some miscellaneous grammatical features of the Gurung languages are:

Phonetically, Gurung languages are tonal.

See also

References

  1. ^ Official Summary of Census (2011), Central Bureau of Statistics, Nepal Archived 2012-12-02 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ "50th Report of the Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities in India" (PDF). 16 July 2014. p. 109. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 January 2018. Retrieved 6 November 2016.
  3. ^ Shafer, Robert (1955). "Classification of the Sino-Tibetan Languages". Word. 11: 94–111.
  4. ^ van Driem, George (1994). Kitamura, Hajime (ed.). East Bodish and Proto-Tibeto-Burman morphosyntax. Current Issues in Sino-Tibetan Linguistics. Osaka: The Organizing Committee of the 26th International Conference on SinoTibetan Languages and Linguistics. pp. 608–617. OCLC 36419031.
  5. ^ David (Ed.), Bradley; Randy (Ed.), Lapolla; Boyd (Ed.), Michailovsky; Graham (Ed.), Thurgood (2015). CRCL, CRCL, Pacific Linguistics And/Or The Author(S). "Language variation: Papers on variation and change in the Sinosphere and in the Indosphere in honour of James A. Matisoff" (PDF). PL-555: 22M, xii + 333 pages. doi:10.15144/PL-555.
  6. ^ Motion, direction and location in languages : in honor of Zygmunt Frajzyngier. Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Erin Shay, Uwe Seibert. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2003. ISBN 978-90-272-7521-9. OCLC 769188822.((cite book)): CS1 maint: others (link)
  7. ^ Grierson, George (1909). Linguistic survey of India Vol. III, Part 1. Delhi: Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  8. ^ Voeglin, C.F.; Voeglin, F.M. (1965). "Languages of the World: Sino-Tibetan Fascicle Four". Anthropological Linguistics. 7: 1–55.

Bibliography

External links

Sino-Tibetan branches
Bodic (Tibeto-Kanauri) languages
Languages of Northeast India
Languages of Bhutan
Languages of Nepal
Gurung language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
Categories