North-East Indian Language

Language and Ethnicity in North-East India The North-Eastern part of India is well known for its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, the area is one of the most heterogeneous region in the world in terms of language diversity. The language in the region belongs to the Tibeto-Burmese, Tibeto-Aryan, Austro-Asiatic group of languages. The Tibeto-Burmese language is a sub family of the Indo-Burmese language as according to George Abraham Grierson. An estimated number of 130 different tribal or ethnic groups reside in the region in which the tribal groups are divided further into sub-groups and around 200 languages are spoken in the region alone. Languages in the Seven North-Eastern States

Royce defines ethnic identity as “the sum total of feelings on the part of group members about those, values, symbols and common histories that identify them as a distinct group. ‘Ethnicity’ is simply ethnic based action”. According to the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences defines ethnic group as a ‘distinct category of the population in a larger society whose culture is usually different from its own’ and a common issue of race, nationality or culture which bounds the different groups together. Another point to be noted is that ethnicity isn’t responsible for maintenance of languages and in the case of a multilingual situation, involving a majority or minority language speaking group, a shift in language may occur. The region is home to different ethnic communities small in number and a need arises in preserving the linguistic and cultural diversity of the minority groups. In language, contact situation between large and small language groups, the minority group or ethnic community is in risk of losing its linguistic or cultural identity, in presence of the bigger community. Linguistic terms such as Language Shift, Language Attrition, Language Death and Language Obsolescence are use in describing certain phenomena, which occurs in case of two languages contact condition. Language shift in an interethnic community, the language condition will be somehow bilingual in nature in which the majority language group might be use in every situation and

An ethnic movement is ethnicity turned militant, consisting of ethnic discontents who perceive the world as against them, an adversary drawing along ethnic boundaries. While ethnicity stretches the content of the culture, ethnic movements will be concerned with boundary maintenance as in Barth’s term us against them. Since the post-independence era and before the region has witnessed number of ethnic movements. Language like religion, culture functions as a key symbol in determining the ‘differentness’ or ‘uniqueness’ of the ethnic or the ethnic sub-group. With the arrival of the Bengali Hindu cult in the 18th century in Manipur, the language identity as well as the scriptures changing as to how the scriptures changed from the Tibeto-burmese ‘Meiteilon’ script to Bengali script and the blending of certain words into the