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Kusunda |
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Kusunda is a language isolate spoken by just a handful of people in western and central Nepal. It has only recently been described
in any detail. For decades the Kusunda language was thought to be on the verge of extinction, with little hope of ever knowing
it well. The little material that could be gleaned from the memories of former speakers suggested that the language was an
isolate, but without much evidence either way it was often classified along with its neighbors as Tibeto-Burman. However,
in 2004 three Kusundas, Gyani Maya Sen, Prem Bahadur Shahi and Kamala Singh, were brought to Kathmandu for help with citizenship
papers. There, members of Tribhuvan University discovered that one of them was a fluent speaker of the language. Several of
her relatives were also discovered to be fluent. There are now known to be at least seven or eight fluent speakers of the
language, the youngest in her thirties. However, the language is moribund, with no children learning it, as all Kusunda speakers
have married outside their ethnicity. Watters (2005) published a mid-sized grammatical description of the language, plus vocabulary,
which shows that Kusunda is indeed a language isolate, not just genealogically but also lexically, grammatically, and phonologically
distinct from its neighbors. It appears that Kusunda is a remnant of the languages spoken in northern India prior to the influx
of Tibeto-Burman- and Indo-Iranian-speaking peoples. |
Names (more)[de] Kusunda[en] Kusunda language [et] Kusunda keel [eu] Kusunda hizkuntza [gv] Kusundaish [it] Lingua kusunda [ko] 쿠순다어 [la] Lingua Kusunda [pl] Język kusunda [ru] Кусунда [es] Idioma kusunda [sv] Kusunda |
Language type : Living
Technical notes
This page is providing structured data for the language Kusunda. |
ISO 639 CodesISO 639-3 : kggLinked Data URIshttp://lexvo.org/id/iso639-3/kgghttp://dbpedia.org/resource/ISO_639:kgg More URIs at sameas.org SourcesAuthority documentation for ISO 639 identifier: kggFreebase ISO 639-3 : kgg GeoNames.org Country Information Publications Office of the European Union Metadata Registry : Countries and Languages |