Assamese Language - History

History

Assamese and its closely related sister languages (Maithili, Bengali and Oriya) developed from Magadhi Prakrit. According to linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji, the Magadhi Prakrit in the east gave rise to four Apabhramsa dialects: Radha, Vanga, Varendra, and Kamarupa; the Kamarupa Apabhramsa, keeping to the north of the Ganges, gave rise to the North Bengal dialects in West Bengal and Assamese in the Brahmaputra valley. A fully distinguished literary form (poetry) appeared in the fourteenth century in the courts of the Kamata kingdom; in the same century, Madhav Kandali translated the Ramayana into the Assamese (Saptakanda Ramayana) in the eastern court of a Kachari king. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, songs (borgeets), dramas (ankiya nat) and the first prose writings (by Bhattadeva) were composed. The literary language, based on the western dialects of Assam moved to the court of the Ahom kingdom in the seventeenth century, where it became the state language. Different kinds of prose developed. According to Goswami (2003), this included "the colloquial prose of religious biographies, the archaic prose of magical charms, the conventional prose of utilitarian literature on medicine, astrology, arithmetic, dance and music, and above all the standardized prose of the Buranjis. The literary language, having become infused with the eastern idiom, became the standard literary form in the nineteenth century, when the British adopted it for state purposes. As the political and commercial center shifted to Guwahati after the mid-twentieth century, the literary form moved away from the eastern variety to take its current form.

Though early compositions in completely differentiated Assamese varieties exist from the fourteenth century, the earliest relics of the language can be found in paleographic records of the Kamarupa Kingdom from the fifth century to the twelfth century. Assamese linguistic features have been discovered in the ninth-century Buddhist verses called Charyapada, coming from the end of the Apabhramsa period and discovered in 1907 in Nepal. Early compositions matured in the fourteenth century, during the reign of the Kamata king Durlabhnarayana of the Khen dynasty, when Madhav Kandali composed the Saptakanda Ramayana. Since the time of the Charyapada, Assamese has been influenced by the languages belonging to the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families in Northeast India, and share many common characteristics with them.