, ‘Birta’ failed to raise the same linguistic concern among the Karbis that ‘Orunudoi’ and ‘Achikni Ripeng’ did for the Assamese and Garo languages. However, another work of great importannce was brought out by GD Walker in the form of ‘A Dictionary of the Mikir language’ in 1925. This book also did not include any grammatical discussion as the author was ‘prompted………to expand the list of words…….gathered while trying to learn the language’ after going through the ‘remark’ in ‘The Mikirs’ that ‘a Mikir-English dictionary or vocabulary was still needed’. In Mr. Walker’s estimate the books by Neighbor and Kay were ‘not very full, and…..especially that by S.P Kay, full of misprints.’ But the 462 paged ‘dictionary’ in Part-I containing Mikir-English and Part-II English-Mikir is a great feat, particularly for a foreigner in spite of his modest admission that ‘errors in the rest of the dictionary will not be surprising, seeing that I had to do all my word-hunting through the Mikir language itself, or through Bengali or Assamese, in which neither my Mikir friends nor myself were very proficient.’ And W.J. Reid, the then acting Governor of Assam, in his foreword to the ‘Dictionary’ had fittingly commended the ‘unflagging zeal with which the author pursued his self-appointed task,’ The ‘small dialectal variation’ in pronunciation that Walker observed between Rongkhang or Eastern Karbis, Nowgaon on the one side and the Western or Amri Karbi on the other seems to have continued till the present time. Walker had show in his example that words like tenedet/ tengnedet (forgotten), ingnar (elephant) or hingno (bad) are pronounced in nasalized ‘tengngedet’, ingar and hingo. The nasalized pronunciation those days are rare but some remnants can still be seen as in the Chinthong areas, penanso (husband and wife) is still pronounced as ‘pengnganso’. Walker’s observation that the language ‘scattered over a wide area, from Golaghat to Kamrup and the Khasi Hills beyond Guwahati, and from the Cachar plains near Silchar to the forests north of Bishanath in Darrang….is practically one and the same throughout’ ascribed to the ‘unwarlike character of the Mikir people’ deserves a further investigation. By being ‘unwarlike’, the Karbis might have managed ‘linguistic uniformity’ over a wide area till now though this trait is increasingly considered as weakness in the present reality where assertion is invariably violent. ‘The more primitive the people, the less warlike it appears to be’ as observed by Wright in his ‘Study of War’ may provide some clues to the Karbis being ‘unwarlike’ and how primitive the tribe is. That the Karbis are indeed primitive is vouched by observations such as ‘the Mikir will be found by most readers the more interesting of the two, as the Mikirs are a more primitive and interesting race than the Meitheis’ in the reviews of ‘The Meitheis’ (TC Hodson) and ‘The Mikirs’ (Stack and Lyall) by M Langworth Dames way back in 1908.
But, a Karbi grammar appeared only in 1966, when Fr. John Marae, instrumental in founding the Diphu Don Bosco School, in collaboration with Fr. John Timung, Fr. Cyriac Thudathil, Mr. Paulus Rongphar and Mr. Sundersing Timung, published the ‘Karbi Self-taught’, a reprint (2007) of which is now available. The brief grammar in English that has adopted ‘Roman Scripts’ has made some crucial observations when the authors commented in the preface to the book’s second edition—‘There are authors who use all the English alphabets to write Karbi, there are writers who propagate the use of “nerkepkep and sirkepkep” for the cardinal numerals 80 and 90 respectively instead of “throknerkep and throksirkep” as had always been used, and there are authors who use “lank” for “lang” ( water).’ Further, the authors’ firm view for dispensing with the ‘use of any sign for stress and tones’ for writing Karbi ‘systematically, grammatically and simply’ is interesting, simply because the tonality of the language would have to be dispensed altogether! In any case, very few such important published works on Karbi language and grammar h