Sylheti language

Sylheti () is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by an estimated 11 million people, primarily in the Sylhet Division of Bangladesh, the Barak Valley and the Hojai district of Assam as well as in northern parts of Tripura in India. Outside of these regions, there are substantial numbers of Sylheti speakers in Meghalaya, Manipur and Nagaland; as well as diaspora communities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Middle East.
It is variously perceived as either a Bengali dialect or a language in its own right. While most linguists consider it an independent language, for many native speakers Sylheti forms the diglossic vernacular, with standard Bengali forming the codified lect. Some incorrectly consider it as a "corrupt" form of Bengali, and there is a reported language shift from Sylheti to Bengali in Bangladesh, India and the diaspora.
Name.
"Sylheti" is eponymously named after Sylhet, referring to the dialect or language spoken of that area. "Sylhet" is the anglicanised spelling of the historical name, "Srihatta". According to the vernacular "was" called "Sylhettia" by the Europeans after the town of Sylhet. Though the speakers at that time referred to it as "Jaintiapuri", "Purba Srihattiya", or "Ujania" with the latter meaning "the language of the upper country".
Sylheti is also known as "Sylhetti", "Sylheti Bangla", "Sileti", "Siloti", "Syloti", and "Syloty".
History.
Sylheti belongs to the Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, that evolved from Magadhi Prakrit. The lowlands around Sylhet were originally inhabited by ancient Khasi people (Austroasiatic); and the earliest known Indo-Aryan settlements were made in the 6th century under Kamarupa king. Sylhet (Srihatta) then emerged as a center of regional territorialism after the 10th century. The 11th century Bhatera grants from the Srihatta kings Kesavadeva and Isanadeva were written in Sanskrit. Another notable copper plate inscription was found in the village of Paschimbhag in Rajnagar, Moulvibazar that was issued by King Srichandra during the 10th century.
The Muslim Conquest of Sylhet in 1303 extended the migratory movements of Muslim Turks, Arabs and Afghans, who settled among the native population and greatly influenced the local language. Thus Sylheti derived a large number of words from Persian and Arabic, which cultivated a form of Islamic culture on the dialect or language. A script was developed in the region called Sylheti Nagri, which primarily focused on disseminating Islamic poetry, known as "puthi". Its earliest known work had been written during the 1600s, called "Bhedsar" by Syed Shah Husayn Alam. The language of its literature was written in a Dobhashi style, a highly Persianised variant of Middle Bengali, though its phonology and some of its vocabulary was strongly influenced by Sylheti. The script was read and taught culturally among households and was not institutionalised, as the Islamic dynasties who ruled over Bengal established Persian alongside Arabic as the official languages. Printed texts of the script reached its peak during the late 19th century, however its use became obsolete by around the middle of the 20th century.
The earliest appearance of a documentation of Sylheti vocabulary was in the "Government Report on the History and Statistics of Sylhet District" by T. Walton, B.C.S. in 1857, which contained a list of peculiar words used in Sylhet. Many terms that were listed here differ from modern Sylheti – highlighting its evolution. In 1868, another short glossary of local terms in various districts of the Dacca Division (which included Sylhet) were written up and compared to standard Bengali to allow ease in understanding local vernaculars. There was an influence of the Assamese language on Sylheti when Sylhet was separated from Bengal and became part of the Assam Province, British India in 1874. This however led to an opposition in Sylhet where demands to be reincorporated with the Bengal Province were not taken heed of by the British. Sylhetis not only felt a historical or cultural affinity with Bengal, but also linguistically. Bengali literature had some influence from Sylheti, popular songwriters or poets such as Hason Raja or Shah Abdul Karim, significantly contributed to the literature. Sylhet was reunited with Bengal following a referendum in 1947.
Status.
According to Simard, Dopierala and Thaut, Sylheti is a "minoritised, politically unrecognised, and understudied language." It is currently not officially recognised as a language in either Bangladesh or India. Some native speakers too consider it to be an informal version of Bengali and not an independent language; and there is a reported language shift to Bengali and a decrease in the number of native speakers since parents are not teaching it to their children. In Bangladesh there is a diglossia where Sylheti is one among other low status regional dialects while standard Bengali, the official language, has a high status. In the Barak Valley of Assam, India, where majority speak Sylheti, Bengali is also the official language. Colonial study in the 19th century considered Sylheti to be a dialect of Bengali. Sylheti shares some linguistic properties with Bengali, with a lexical similarity of 70%. 
Classification.
 notes that even though "Sylhettia" (which he referred to as the dialect of "Eastern Sylhet" specifically) is not intelligible to some other Bengalis, it is still classed as Bengali, grouping it under "Eastern Bengali". too calls it a dialect of Bengali and places it in the eastern Vangiya group of Magadhi Prakrit and notes that all Bengali dialects were independent of each other and did not emanate from the literary Bengali called "sadhu bhasha". Among the different dialect groups of the eastern dialects, to which Sylheti belonged, Sylheti and Chittagonian have phonetic and morphological properties that are alien to standard Bengali and other western dialects of Bengali, and these differences are such that Sylheti is more distant to standard Bengali than is Assamese. Recent scholarship notes that these morpho-phonological and mutual intelligibilty differences are significant enough that Sylheti could claim itself as a language on its own right. Ethnologue groups Sylheti in Bengali-Assamese languages; whereas Glotolog gives further subgrouping and places it in "Eastern Bengali", a branch parallel to "Bengali".
Language-dialect controversy.
The classification of Sylheti is contentious—Chalmers (1996) suggested that it was generally identified as a dialect of Bengali though there were efforts to recognise it as a language. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Sylhetis, who could also speak in Standard Bengali, considered the two languages to be mutually intelligible. On the basis of the anecdotal evidence of mutual intelligibility, regionality and the fact that Sylheti is spoken by a predominantly rural community, concludes that Sylheti could be considered a dialect of Bengali. Simard, Dopierala and Thaut have pointed out that the intelligibility could be an effect of prior exposure of Sylheti speakers to Bengali, and that the academic consensus is that mutual intelligibility ranges from "unintelligible" to "hardly intelligible". On the basis of phonology and phonetics, lexicon, grammatical structure and a lack of mutual intelligibility, some recent linguists claim that Sylheti is not merely a dialectal variation of Bengali but a language in its own right.
Phonologically Sylheti is distinguished from standard Bengali and other regional varieties by significant deaspiration and spirantization, leading to major restructuring of the consonant inventory and the development of tones. Although Grierson had classified Sylheti as an Eastern Bengali dialect, he had identified Sylheti sharing some features with Assamese including a larger set of inflections than Bengali.
As majority of the diaspora in the United Kingdom speak Sylheti, it created an environment that was somewhat uninfluenced by standard Bengali, inevitably leading some to view Sylheti as a distinct language. During the 1980s there were unsuccessful attempts to recognise Sylheti as a language in its own right by a small group in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, which lacked support from the Sylheti community itself.
Geographical distribution.
Sylheti is the primary language of northeast Bengal (also known as the Sylhet region) which today comprises the Sylhet Division of Bangladesh and Karimganj district of Assam, India. Within the Sylhet Division, it is primarily spoken in the districts of Sylhet and Moulvibazar, as well as in certain upazilas of Sunamganj and Habiganj such as Jagannathpur and Chhatak among a few others. This is contrary to popular belief that Sylheti is spoken everywhere in the Sylhet Division. Anecdotal evidence claims that the people of Sylhet District, when visiting places like Habiganj, are often startled that the locals do not converse in Sylheti but rather in Habiganji, which is transitional to the dialects of Sylhet, Greater Mymensingh and Brahmanbaria.
It is also primarily spoken in the districts of Cachar and Hailakandi of Assam, which alongside Karimganj make up the Barak Valley, as well as in the northern parts of Tripura and the western edge of Manipur. There is also a significant population of Sylheti speakers in the Hojai district of Assam (since before Partition), Shillong in Meghalaya, and the state of Nagaland. A few numbers are also located in Kolkata, most of whom are migrants from Assam.
Outside the Indian subcontinent, the largest Sylheti diaspora communities reside in the United Kingdom and North America. In the UK, there are around 400,000 Sylheti speakers. The largest concentration live in east London boroughs, such as Tower Hamlets. In the United States, most are concentrated in New York City borough's such as the Bronx, and there are significant numbers in Hamtramck, Michigan where they constitute the majority of Bangladeshis in the city. There are also small numbers located in Toronto, Canada. Significant Sylheti-speaking communities reside in the Middle East of which most are migrant workers, and in many other countries throughout the world.
Writing system.
Sylheti currently does not have a standardised writing system. Historically in the Sylhet region, the Sylheti Nagri script was used alongside the Bengali script. Sylheti Nagri was however mostly limited to writing religious poetry. This written form was identical to those written in the Dobhashi register due to both lacking the use of tatsama and using Perso-Arabic vocabulary as a replacement. As per Dobhashi custom, many Sylheti Nagri texts were paginated from right to left. The orthography of the script equates with Sylheti, it has fewer characters as compared with the Bengali script due to fewer phonemes found in Sylheti. An endangered script, it has since seen a revival mostly by academics and linguists. 
Bengali is the medium of instruction in Bangladesh, some may therefore write in Sylheti using the Bengali script, however it is viewed as more formal to write in standard Bengali. Although books are rarely published in the Bengali script with Sylheti transcription, the New Testament in Sylheti was published in 2014.
Phonology.
The phoneme inventory of Sylheti differs from Standard Bengali as well Bangladeshi Standard. It is characterised by a loss of breathiness and aspiration contrasts, leading to a significant reduction in its phoneme inventory and development of tones. In particular the following developments are seen:
Tone.
Sylheti is a tonal language. This is rare among the Indo-Aryan languages. There are two types of tonal contrasts in Sylheti: the emergence of high tone in the vowels following the loss of aspiration, and a level tone elsewhere.
Recent study shows that there is a three way tonal system in Sylheti.
It is considered that these tones arose when aspirated consonants lost their aspiration. Sylheti continues to have a long history of coexisting with tonal Tibeto-Burman languages such as various dialects of Kokborok, Reang. Even though there is no clear evidence of direct borrowing of lexical items from those languages into Sylheti, there is still a possibility that the emergence of Sylheti tones is due to external influence, as the indigenous speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages by and large use Sylheti as a common medium for interaction.
Grammar.
Sylheti grammar is the study of the morphology and syntax of Sylheti.
Nouns.
Case.
When a definite article such as "-gu/ţa" (singular) or "-guin/ţin" (plural) is added, nouns are also inflected for number. Below are two tables which show the inflections of an animate noun, "satrô" (student), and an inanimate noun, "zuta" (shoe).
All of the inflected nouns above have an indefinite article preceding their case markers. There are some basic rules to keep in mind about the cases, apart from the "default" nominative.
For the genitive case, the ending may change, though never with a definite article attached. A noun (without an article) which ends in a consonant or the inherent vowel, "ô", is inflected by adding -"ôr" to the end of the word (and deleting the inherent vowel if applicable). An example of this would be the genitive of "gus" "meat" being "gustôr "of meat" or "(the) meat's". A noun which ends in any vowel apart from the inherent vowel will just have a -"r" following it, as in the genitive of "fua" being "fuar "(the) boy's". The genitive ending is also applied to verbs (in their verbal noun forms), which is most commonly seen when using postpositions (for example: "hikar" "lagi", "for learning").
For the locative case, the marker also changes in a similar fashion to the genitive case, with consonants and the inherent vowel having their own ending, -"ô", and all other vowels having another ending, -"t". For example, "silôţô" "in Sylhet", "dáxát" "in Dhaka", etc.
Measure words.
When counted, nouns must also be accompanied by the appropriate measure word. The noun's measure word (MW) must be used in between the numeral and the noun. Most nouns take the generic measure word "gu/ţa/xán", although there are many more specific measure words, such as "zôn", which is only used to count humans.
Measuring nouns in Sylheti without their corresponding measure words (e.g. "aţ mekur" instead of "aţ-ţa mekur" "eight cats") would typically be considered ungrammatical. However, omitting the noun and preserving the measure word is grammatical and not uncommon to hear. For example, "Xáli êx-zôn táxbô." (lit. "Only one-MW will remain.") would be understood to mean "Only one person will remain.", since "zôn" can only be used to count humans.
Pronouns.
Personal pronouns.
Sylheti personal pronouns are somewhat similar to English pronouns, having different words for first, second, and third person, and also for singular and plural (unlike for verbs, below). Sylheti pronouns, like their English counterparts, do differentiate for gender. Sylheti has different third-person pronouns for proximity. The first are used for someone who is nearby, and the second are for those who are a little further away. The third are usually for those who are not present. In addition, each of the second- and third-person pronouns have different forms for the familiar and polite forms; the second person also has a "very familiar" form (sometimes called "despective"). It may be noted that the "very familiar" form is used when addressing particularly close friends or family as well as for addressing subordinates, or in abusive language. In the following tables, the abbreviations used are as follows: VF=very familiar, F=familiar, and P=polite (honor); H=here, T=there, E=elsewhere (proximity), and I=inanimate.
The nominative case is used for pronouns that are the subject of the sentence, such as "I already did that" or "Will you please stop making that noise?" 
The objective case is used for pronouns serving as the direct or indirect objects, such as "I told him to wash the dishes" or "The teacher gave me the homework assignment". The inanimate pronouns remain the same in the objective case.
The possessive case is used to show possession, such as "Where is your coat?" or "Let's go to our house". In addition, sentences such as "I have a book" () or "I need money" () also use the possessive (the literal translation of the Bengali versions of these sentences would be "There is my book" and "There is my need for money" respectively).
Indefinite and negative pronouns.
Bengali has no negative pronouns (such as "no one, nothing, none"). These are typically represented by adding the negative particle ("nae") to indefinite pronouns, which are themselves derived from their corresponding question words. Common indefinite pronouns are listed below.
Relative pronouns.
The relative pronoun ("ze") and its different variants, as shown below, are commonly employed in complex sentences. The relative pronouns for animate objects change for number and honor, but those for inanimate objects stay the same.
Adjectives.
Adjectives do not inflect for case, gender, or number in Sylheti and are placed before the noun they modify.
Some adjectives form their opposites by prefixing (before consonants) or (before vowels) or , for example, the opposite of ("shômbôb", "possible") is ("ôshômbôb", "impossible"), the opposite of ("matra", "speaker") is ("nimatra", "quite").
Demonstrative adjectives – "this" and "that" – correspond to and respectively, with the definite article attached to the following noun. Thus, "this book" would translate to , while "those books" would translate to .
Comparatives and superlatives.
Sylheti adjectives form their comparative forms with ("arô", "more"), and their superlative forms with ("shôb táki", "than all"). Comparisons are formed by using genitive form of the object of comparison, followed by the postposition ("táki/tóne/se", "than") or the postposition ("laxan", "like") and then by ("arô", "more") or ("xôm", "less"). The word for "more" is optional, but the word for "less" is required, so in its absence "more" is inferred. Adjectives can be additionally modified by using ("bakka/bout/ônex", "much") or ("ônex beshi", "much more"), which are especially useful for comparing quantities.
Verbs.
Sylheti verbs are highly inflected and are regular with only few exceptions. They consist of a stem and an ending; they are traditionally listed in Sylheti dictionaries in their "verbal noun" form, which is usually formed by adding "-a" to the stem: for instance, ("xôra, to do") is formed from the stem . The stem can end in either a vowel or a consonant. Verbs are conjugated for tense and person by changing the endings, which are largely the same for all verbs. However, the stem vowel can often change as part of the phenomenon known as "vowel harmony", whereby one vowel can be influenced by other vowels in the word to sound more harmonious. An example would be the verb "to write", with stem "lex-": ("lexô, you all write") but also ("lekí, we write"). If verbs are classified by stem vowel and if the stem ends in a consonant or vowel, there are nine basic classes in which most verbs can be placed; all verbs in a class will follow the same pattern. A prototype verb from each of these classes will be used to demonstrate conjugation for that class; bold will be used to indicate mutation of the stem vowel. Additionally, there are irregular verbs, such as ("zaoa," to go) that change the first consonant in their stem in certain conjugations.
Like many other Indo-Aryan languages (such as Bengali or Assamese), nouns can be turned into verbs by combining them with select auxiliary verbs. In Sylheti, the most common such auxiliary verb is ("xôra, to do);" thus, verbs such as "joke" are formed by combining the noun form of "joke" () with "to do" () to create . When conjugating such verbs the noun part of such a verb is left untouched, so in the previous example, only would be inflected or conjugated (e.g.: "I will make a joke" becomes ; see more on tenses below). Other auxiliary verbs include and , but the verb enjoys significant usage because it can be combined with foreign verbs to form a native version of the verb, even if a direct translation exists. Most often this is done with English verbs: for example, "to vote" is often referred to as ("búţ deoa", where "búţ" is the transliteration of "vote").
Copula.
Sylheti is considered a zero copula language in some aspects.
The following table demonstrates the rules above with some examples.
Negation.
There are three sentence negators employed in Sylheti:
Person.
Verbs are inflected for person and honour, but not for number. There are five forms: first person, second person (very familiar), second person (familiar), third person (familiar), and second/third person (polite). The same sample subject pronouns will be used for all the example conjugation paradigms: "mui" (), "ami" (), "tui" (), "tumi" (), "he" (), "tai" () and "afne" (). These have the following plurals respectively: "môra" (), "amra" (), "tura" (), "tumra" ()/"tumi-tain" (), "tara" ()/"tain-tain" () and "afnara" ().
Comparison.
A notable characteristic of spoken Sylheti is the correspondence of the and , pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative to the or of Bengali and voiceless glottal fricative to the /x/ of Assamese respectively.
Comparison with standard Bengali.
A phrase in:
which literally means "one land's obscenity is another land's language", and can be roughly translated to convey that a similar word in one language can mean something very different in another.
Another example:
 মেঘ "megh" in Standard Bengali means "cloud" .