he less for the development of the Karbi language as well. Three decades after the publication of Dr. Brown’s grammar, another missionary, Rev. RE Neighbor compiled the ‘Vocabulary of English and Mikir, with illustrative sentences’, in 1878 that deserves to be called the ‘first’ karbi ‘dictionary’. As the title aptly describes, the book had nothing to do with the grammatical aspects of the language, what it did was putting down as many vocabularies as possible for the benefit of English readers. Another three decades later, Sardoka Perrin Kay’s ‘English-Mikir Dictionary’ came out in print in 1904. Four years later in 1908, Sir Charles Lyall and Edward Stack followed it up with ‘The Mikirs’, the first ethnographic details on the Karbis. This monograph also contained some important grammatical basics of the language based on Mr. Lyall’s ‘study…. in the linguistic materials collected’ by Mr. Neighbor’s vocabulary, Sardoka’s dictionary and phrase book, though Mr. Stack ‘himself had drawn no grammar’. Mr. Lyall ‘contributed’ the same material to the first ever ‘Linguistic Survey of India’ (1902) conducted by Sir George Abraham Greierson between 1898-1929. Mr. Lyall had acknowledged Sir Grieerson’s sketches of the Karbi grammar to be ‘the first published attempt to explain systematically the facts and mechanism of the language.’
The efforts of the Baptist and Catholic Missionaries and the colonial officers on Karbi language, whether or not they were driven by ‘the interest of their own’, but what mattered most was that a very bold and positive beginning was made. That collectively the subsequent generations of Karbis failed to capitalize on the early foundation provided by them still remains a matter of a serious concern. The missionaries ran a ‘newspaper’ in Karbi titled ‘Birta’ in 1903. They had a similar publication in Garo language by the name ‘Achikni Ripeng’ (Garos’ Friend) that started publication since 1881 and ‘served much the same purpose for the Garos that the Orunudoi had served for the Assamese’. But sadly, ‘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 no