The Ahom language is a nearly extinct Tai language spoken by the Ahom people who ruled the Brahmaputra river valley in the present day Indian state of Assam between the 13th and the 18th centuries. The language is classified in a Northwestern subgrouping of Southwestern Tai owing to close affinities with Shan, Khamti and, more distantly, Thai. As the Ahom rulers of the area assimilated to the more numerous Assamese, the Indo-Aryan Assamese language gradually replaced Ahom as a spoken language, a process which became complete during the 19th century. As of 2000, Ahom was only known by approximately 200 priests of the traditional Ahom religion and only used for ceremonial or ritualistic purposes.
Although the language is no longer spoken, the exhaustive 1795 Ahom-Assamese lexicon known as the Bar Amra preserves the form of the language that was spoken during the Ahom Kingdom. Ahom is an important language in Tai studies. It was relatively free of both Mon-Khmer and Indo-Aryan influences and has a written tradition dating back to the 13th century.
Read more about Ahom Language: Language Characteristics, History of The Language
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)