Assamese

Where it’s spoken

Assamese (অসমীয়া, Ôxômiya) is the official language of the Indian state of Assam, with about 15 million native speakers and tens of millions of additional second-language users from neighboring ethnic groups. It functions as the regional lingua franca of much of the Indian Northeast.

What it sounds like

Assamese is one of the few Indo-Aryan languages without true retroflex consonants — historical retroflexes shifted to alveolar or fricative pronunciations. It distinguishes a voiceless velar fricative (x — hence the name “Ôxômiya”) not found in Bengali. Vowel inventory is roughly eight with phonemic length.

How it’s written

Assamese uses a script that is essentially identical to the Bengali script with two unique letters: ৰ (ra, replacing Bengali র) and ৱ (wa, instead of Bengali ব). The script is a Brahmic abugida with the characteristic horizontal headstroke.

History

Assamese diverged from a common Eastern Indo-Aryan ancestor with Bengali by the 7th–9th centuries. The Charyapadas, mystical Buddhist songs from c. 1000 CE, are claimed as ancestors by both Assamese and Bengali. Sankardev’s 15th–16th-century devotional movement produced major literary works.