LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 22:1 January 2022
ISSN 1930-2940

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         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
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A Linguistic Study of Kumbi Dialect of Meeteilon

Nongmaithem Pritamkumar, M.A., Ph.D. in Linguistics

Abstract

Meeteilon (Manipuri) has a number of dialect communities. Among those, Kumbi is also one of the dialect areas of Meeteilon. This dialect area of Meeteilon is situated at the southern part of Imphal. This paper attempts to find out the variations that are found in Kumbi dialect with reference to Imphal dialect. These two dialects have variations regarding morphophonemic changes, lexical variations, syntactic level, tone, etc. In these two dialects, not only lexical variation but also semantic variation can be observed.

Keywords: Meeteilon, Kumbi Dialect, Morphophonemic variations, Lexical and Semantic Variations, Morphosyntactic variations.

Introduction

Manipuri, a Tibeto-Burman language, has more than twenty different varieties or dialects. Among those, some are established as a dialect, and some are needed to establish as a dialect. Kumbi dialect is a variety of Manipuri that is spoken at the southern part of Imphal. It is 52 km far away from the capital city, Imphal. Moirang, Thanga, Saiton, Ithai, Wangoo, Sagang etc. are the neighbouring villages of Kumbi. There is good connectivity with other villages through road transportation system. The main occupations of the villagers are agriculture, fishing, weaving, etc. Rice and fish are the main products of this village. Kumbi is also famous for Hentak (pastry fermented fish).

There is mutual intelligibility between the Kumbi and Imphal dialects. Sometimes, the people of Imphal cannot understand the speech of Kumbi dialect because of having differences in accent, lexical items, tone etc. However, to minimize the communication gap, the people of Kumbi dialect try to speak in standard form i.e., Imphal dialect which is treated as standard one. Not only Kumbi, but also other dialects of Manipuri use standard form while communicating with others. It is also observed that there is no big difference between the male and female speakers of Kumbi dialect except pitch level and selection of some specific words while speaking. Those male and female forms of speech are not focused in this paper. Nowadays, the original dialect forms of speech are losing gradually due to the influence of standard dialect as well as dialect borrowing. Even though, some variations can be observed still today. Those variations are in the morphophonemic, lexical, semantic as well as morphosyntactic levels.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Nongmaithem Pritamkumar, M.A., Ph.D. in Linguistics
Project Staff (Linguist)
Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Senapati
Mantripukhri, Imphal 795002
pritamkumbicha4@gmail.com
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