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Ahom language

Ahom
Native to India
Region Assam
Ethnicity Ahom people
Extinct (date missing)
used in religious chants and literary materials
Tai–Kadai
Ahom script
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Glottolog ahom1240

The Ahom language is a nearly extinct Tai language spoken by the Ahom people who ruled the Brahmaputra river valley in the present day Indian state of Assam between the 13th and the 18th centuries. The language is classified in a Northwestern subgrouping of Southwestern Tai owing to close affinities with Shan, Khamti and, more distantly, Thai. As the Ahom rulers of the area assimilated to the more numerous Assamese, the Indo-Aryan Assamese language gradually replaced Ahom as a spoken language, a process which became complete during the 19th century. As of 2000, Ahom was only known by approximately 200 priests of the traditional Ahom religion and only used for ceremonial or ritualistic purposes.

Although the language is no longer spoken, the exhaustive 1795 Ahom-Assamese lexicon known as the Bar Amra preserves the form of the language that was spoken during the Ahom Kingdom. Ahom is an important language in Tai studies. It was relatively free of both Mon-Khmer and Indo-Aryan influences and has a written tradition dating back to the 13th century.

Ahom is classified as a Southwestern Tai language. It has its own script. Ahom has characteristics typical of Tai languages, such as:

When speaking and writing Ahom, much is dependent upon context and the audience interpretation. Multiple parts of the sentence can be left out; verb and adjectives will remain, but other parts of speech, especially pronouns, can be dropped. Verbs do not have tenses, and nouns do not have plurals. Time periods can be identified by adverbs, strings of verbs, or auxiliaries placed before the verb. Ahom, like other Tai languages, uses classifiers to identify categories, and repetitions of words to express idiomatic expressions. However, the expressions, classifiers, pronouns, and other sentence particles vary between the Tai languages descended from Proto-Tai, making Tai languages mutually unintelligible.


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