Garo language

Garo, or A·chik (as it is called among the natives), is a language spoken in India in the Garo Hills districts of Meghalaya, some parts of Assam, and in small pockets in Tripura. It is also spoken in certain areas of the neighbouring Bangladesh. According to the 2001 census, there are about 889,000 Garo speakers in India alone; another 130,000 are found in Bangladesh.

Ethnologue lists the following locations for Garo.

Garo belongs to the Bodo-Garo subgroup of the Sino-Tibetan, which includes Sinitic languages like Mandarin and Cantonese. The Bodo-Garo subgroup is one of the longest recognised and most coherent subgroups of the Sino-Tibetan language family. This includes languages such as Bodo, Kokborok, Tiwa, Deuri, Garo, Rabha, Atong, Ruga, and Koch. Being closely related to each other, these languages have many features in common; and one can easily recognise the similarities even from a surface-level observation of a given data of words from these languages.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the American Baptist missionaries put the north-eastern dialect of Garo called A·we into writing, initially using the Bengali script. The reason for its selection out of many others was because the north-eastern region of Garo Hills was where rapid growth in the number of educated Garo people was taking place. Besides, the region was also where education was first imparted to the Garos. In course of time, the dialect became associated with educated culture. Today, a variant of the dialect can be heard among the speakers of Tura, a small town in the west-central part of Garo Hills, which is actually an Am·beng-speaking region. But with the migration of educated north-easterners to Tura due to the establishment of the political headquarters there, after Garo Hills came under the complete control of the British Government in 1873, the town saw a shift from its use of the native dialect to the dialect of the north-easterners. Tura also became the educational hub of Garo Hills, and in time a de facto standard developed from the north-eastern dialect (A·we) which gradually became associated with the town and the educated Garo speech everywhere ever since. As regards Garo orthography, basic Latin alphabet completely replaced the Bengali script only by 1924, although a Latin-based alphabet had already been developed by the American missionaries in 1902. The Latin-based Garo alphabet used today consists of 20 letters and a raised dot called "raka" (a symbol representing the glottal stop); the letters "f”, "q”, "v”, "x”, "y”, and "z” appear only in imported words. In Bangladesh, a variant of the Bengali script is still used alongside its Latin counterpart. Bengali and Assamese had been the mediums of instruction in educational institutions until 1924, and they have played a great role in the evolution of the modern Garo as we know today. As a result, many Bengali and Assamese words entered the Garo vocabulary. Since recently, there has also been a proliferation of English words entering the everyday Garo speech owing to media and the preference of English-medium schools over those conducted in the vernacular. Hindi is also making a slow but firm appearance in the language.