Tamang | |
---|---|
तामाङ, རྟ་དམག་ / རྟ་མང་/ | |
Native to |
Nepal India Bhutan |
Ethnicity | Tamang/Moormi |
Native speakers | 1.4 million in Nepal (2021 census)
[1] 20,154 in India (2011 census) [2] |
Tamyig script, Devanagari, Tibetan | |
Official status | |
Official language in | Nepal |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | Variously:
taj – Eastern Tamang
tdg – Western Tamang
tge – Eastern Gorkha Tamang |
Glottolog |
nucl1729 |
Tamang ( Devanagari: तामाङ; tāmāng) is a term used to collectively refer to a dialect cluster spoken mainly in Nepal, Sikkim, West Bengal ( Darjeeling) and North-Eastern India. It comprises Eastern Tamang, Northwestern Tamang, Southwestern Tamang, Eastern Gorkha Tamang, and Western Tamang. Lexical similarity between Eastern Tamang (which is regarded as the most prominent) and other Tamang languages varies between 81% and 63%. For comparison, lexical similarity between Spanish and Portuguese, is estimated at 89%. [4]
Ethnologue divides Tamang into the following varieties due to mutual unintelligibility.
The Tamang language is the most widely spoken Sino-Tibetan language in Nepal.
Ethnologue gives the following location information for the varieties of Tamang.
Eastern Tamang
Southwestern Tamang
Western Tamang
Eastern Tamang
Some grammatical features of the Tamang languages include:
Phonetically Tamang languages are tonal.
Labial |
Dental/ Alveolar |
Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||||
Plosive/ Affricate |
voiceless | p | t | ts | ʈ | k | ||
aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | tsʰ | ʈʰ | kʰ | |||
palatalized | pʲ | tʲ | tsʲ | ʈʲ | kʲ | |||
labialized | pʷ | tʷ | tsʷ | ʈʷ | kʷ | |||
Fricative | s | h | ||||||
Rhotic | r | |||||||
Approximant | w | l | j |
Front | Back | |
---|---|---|
Close | i iː | u uː |
Mid | e eː | o oː |
Open | a aː |
Nasality only marginally occurs, and is typically transcribed with a [ã] mark.
Four tones occur as high falling [â], mid-high level [á], mid-low level [à], very low [ȁ]. [6]
Tamang language is written in prakriti.
of India: Sikkim volume I, New Delhi: Office of Registrar General India, pp: 388-455 https://censusindia.gov.in/census.website/data/LSI