G.A. Grierson's linguistic map of Tibeto-Burman family, 1903.[2]
Kachari is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Boro-Garo branch that is spoken in Assam, India. With fewer than 60,000 speakers recorded in 1997, and the Asam 2001 Census reporting a literacy rate of 81% the Kachari language is currently ranked as threatened.[3] Kachari is closely related to surrounding languages, including Tiwa, Rābhā, Hajong, Kochi and Mechi.[4]
While there are still living adult speakers, many children are not learning Kachari as their primary language, instead being assimilated into the wider Assamese speaking communities.[5]
Some alternative names are Boro,[6] Bara, Cachari,[7] Plains Kachari[5] and Hill Kachari.[7]
Kachari uses many instances of "compound words" to denote meaning. For example, the word for "boy", is really the combination of the Kachari words for "male" and "child". This also correlates with Kachari verbs, which can be agglutinated to form "compound verbs".[9] While Kachari is not polysynthetic, its verbs act as a stem for descriptive adjective, adverbs or affixes to change its meaning. For example, the "conjugation of the regular verb active, 'nu-nǔ.' to see" results in the following:[10]
As can be seen from the chart above, the future tense is indicated with -gan, while -si- indicates that the future event will occur soon or in the near future. One example is "Bí faigan", he will come, as opposed to "Bí faisigan", he will come (almost at once) or he is about to come.[10]
Present Tense
Present tense is shown through three affixes, "ǔ", "dong" and "gô". The first two forms represent indefinite and definite forms and are far more common that "gô", which is frequently only used to answer questions in the affirmative.
Adjectives
Most adjectives can be added both before or after the noun it is describing, though it gains the case ending if it follows the noun, rather than precedes it.[10] This follows the identification of as a strongly suffixing language.[11] However, this classification goes against Konwar's description of Kachari and a related language, Karbi, as primarily prefixing to create adjectives.[12]
Numerical adjectives are always inserted after the noun it is describing. For example, "ten goats" is "Burmá má-zǔ" with "Burmá" meaning goat, "má" being the classifier for "animal" and the number ten being "zǔ".[4][10]
Morphology
Gender - Common nouns such as father, mother, brother or sister have distinct masculine and feminine words while other nouns including animals, will typically have the words for male and female, -jelá and -jeu respectively, added on as a suffix to denote gender. Other common masculine and feminine suffix forms that may be used include -zǎlá/-zǔ, -bundā/-bundi, -bóndá/-bóndi, -phántá/-phánti and -pherá/-pheri.[4][10]
Number System
Kachari has a decimal system and counts to 10 with unique words, after which the number words combine to add to the larger number as shown in the chart below.[13]
Jacquesson, François (2008). "Discovering Boro-Garo"(PDF). History of an Analytical and Descriptive Linguistic Category. Archived from the original(PDF) on 3 August 2019. Retrieved 23 March 2020.
DeLancey, Scott (2012). Hyslop, Gwendolyn; Morey, Stephen; w. Post, Mark (eds.). "On the Origin of Bodo-Garo". Northeast Indian Linguistics. 4: 3–20. doi:10.1017/UPO9789382264521.003. ISBN9789382264521.
Joseph, U.V., and Burling, Robbins. 2006. Comparative phonology of the Boro Garo languages. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages Publication.
