Assamese language

Assamese (ˌæsəˈmiːz), also Asamiya (ɔxɔmija অসমীয়া), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, where it is an official language, and it serves as a lingua franca of the wider region. The easternmost Indo-Iranian language, it has over 15 million speakers according to Ethnologue. Nefamese, an Assamese-based pidgin in Arunachal Pradesh, was used in as the lingua franca till it was replaced by Hindi; and Nagamese, an Assamese-based Creole language, continues to be widely used in Nagaland. The Kamtapuri language of Rangpur division of Bangladesh and the Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri districts of India are linguistically closer to Assamese, though the speakers identify with the Bengali culture and the literary language. In the past, it was the court language of the Ahom kingdom from the 17th century. Along with other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Assamese evolved at least before the 7th century CE from the middle Indo-Aryan Magadhi Prakrit. Its sister languages include Angika, Bengali, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Chakma, Chittagonian, Hajong, Rajbangsi, Maithili, Rohingya and Sylheti. It is written in the Assamese alphabet, an abugida system, from left to right, with many typographic ligatures. Assamese originated in Old Indo-Aryan dialects, though the exact nature of its origin and growth is not clear yet. It is generally believed that Assamese and the Kamatapuri lects derive from the Kamarupi dialect of Eastern Magadhi Prakrit though some authors contest a close connection of Assamese with Magadhi Prakrit. The Indo-Aryan, which appeared in the 4th-5th century in Assam, was probably spoken in the new settlements of Kamarupa—in urban centers and along the Brahmaputra river—surrounded by Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic communities. Kakati's (1941) assertion that Assamese has an Austroasiatic substrate is generally accepted – which suggests that when the Indo-Aryan centers formed in the 4th-5th centuries CE, there were substantial Austroasiatic speakers that later accepted the Indo-Aryan vernacular.