Ancient Meitei Language

Meitei (), also known as Manipuri (, ), is a Tibeto-Burman language of north-eastern India. It is spoken by around 1.8 million people, predominantly in the state of Manipur, but also by smaller communities in the rest of the country and in parts of neighbouring Myanmar and Bangladesh. It is native to the Meitei people, and within Manipur it serves as an official language and a lingua franca. It was used as a court language in the historic Manipur Kingdom and is presently included among the 22 scheduled languages of India.

Meitei is a tonal language whose exact classification within Sino-Tibetan remains unclear. It has lexical resemblances to Kuki and Tangkhul.

Meitei is the most widely spoken Indian Sino-Tibetan language and the most spoken language in northeast India after Bengali and Assamese.
There are million Meitei speakers in India according to the 2011 census. The majority of these, or million, are found in the state of Manipur, where they represent just over half of its population. There are smaller communities in the Indian states of Assam (), Tripura (), Nagaland (), and elsewhere in the country (). Additionally, there are around 200,000 L2 speakers. The language is also spoken by smaller groups in neighbouring Myanmar and Bangladesh. Meitei is not endangered: its status has been assessed as safe in ''Ethnologue'' (where it is assigned to EGIDS level 2 "provincial language"), but is considered vulnerable in UNESCO's ''Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger''.

Name

The name ''Meitei'' or its alternate spelling ''Meithei'' is preferred by many native speakers of Meitei over ''Manipuri.''Chelliah (1997: 2) The term is derived from the Meitei word for the language ''Meitheirón'' (''Meithei'' + ''-lon'' 'language', pronounced ). ''Meithei'' may be a compound from ''mí'' 'man' + ''they'' 'separate'. This term is used by most Western linguistic scholarship. Meitei scholars use the term ''Meit(h)ei'' when writing in English and the term ''Meitheirón'' when writing in Meitei. Chelliah (2015: 89) notes that the ''Meitei'' spelling has replaced the earlier ''Meithei'' spelling.

The language (and people) is also referred to by the loconym ''Manipuri.'' The term is derived from name of the state of Manipur. ''Manipuri'' is the official name of the language for the Indian government and is used by government institutions and non-Meitei authors. The term ''Manipuri'' is also used to refer to the different languages of Manipur and people. Additionally, ''Manipuri,'' being a loconym, can refer to anything pertaining to Manipur state.

The term ''Meetei'' is used by Meitei speakers who want political autonomy from India, so-called "revivalists".

Speakers of Meitei language are known as ''"Kathe"'' by the Burmese people, ''"Moglie"'' or ''"Mekhlee"'' by the people of Cachar, Assam ( Kacharis and Assamese) and ''"Cassay"'' by the Shan people and the other people living in the east of the Ningthee River (or Khyendwen River). ''"Ponna"'' is the Burmese term used to refer to the Meiteis living inside Burma.

Dialects

The Meitei language exhibits a degree of regional variation; however, in recent years the broadening of communication, as well as intermarriage, has caused the dialectal differences to become relatively insignificant. The only exceptions to this occurrence are the speech differences of the dialects found in Tripura, Bangladesh and Myanmar. The exact number of dialects of Meitei is unknown.

The three main dialects of Meitei are: Meitei proper, Loi and Pangal. Differences between these dialects are primarily characterised by the extensions of new sounds and tonal shifts. Meitei proper is considered to be the standard variety—and is viewed as more dynamic than the other two dialects. The brief table below compares some words in these three dialects:

Devi (2002)Devi, L. Manimala. 2002. A comparative study of Imphal, Andro, Koutruk and Kakching dialects of Meiteiron. (Doctoral dissertation, Canchipur: Manipur University; 273pp.) compares the Imphal, Andro, Koutruk, and Kakching dialects of Meitei.

Status

Meitei is the sole official language of the Government of Manipur. It is used for all official purposes, except for some interstate cases. Meitei is included among the languages that stand apart of the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India, thus granting it the status of a "scheduled language".

It was the court language of the historic Manipur Kingdom (Meeteileipak), and was declared as such in the kingdom's 1947 Constitution, before it merged into the Indian Republic.
Meitei was recognised by the National Sahitya Akademi as one of the major Indian languages in 1972.

The Meitei language has been recognised (under the name ''Manipuri'') by the Indian Union and was included in the list of scheduled languages (included in the 8th schedule by the 71st amendment of the constitution in 1992). It has been recognised by the National Sahitya Academy for its rich literary traditions. Besides being a medium of instructions in the educational institutions in Manipur, it is taught as a subject up to the post-graduate level (Ph.D.) in major universities of India, including Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, Gauhati University, and University of North Bengal.

In the modern era, several Meitei language movements have been in existence, including the '' linguistic purism movement, scheduled language movement, classical language movement, associate official language movement''. There is a proposal for the language to be granted the elite status of " Classical Languages of India". Besides, it is also proposed to be recognised as an ''"associate official language"'' of the Government of Assam. According to Leishemba Sanajaoba, the present titular king of Manipur and a Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha from Manipur state, by recognising Meitei as an ''associate official language'' of Assam, the identity, history, culture and tradition of Manipuris residing in Assam could be able to get protected and preserved.

Phonology

Tone

The Meitei language is a tonal language. There is a controversy over whether there are two or three tones.

Segments

Meitei distinguishes the following phonemes:

Consonants

Vowels

Note: the central vowel /ɐ/ is transcribed as <ə> in recent linguistic work on Meitei. However, phonetically it is never � but more usually � It is assimilated to a following approximant: /ɐw/ = /ow/, /ɐj/ = j

Phonological processes

A velar deletion is noted to occur on the suffix -lək when following a syllable ending with a /k/ phoneme.

Meitei has a dissimilatory process similar to Grassmann's law found in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, though occurring on the second aspirate. Here, an aspirated consonant is deaspirated if preceded by an aspirated consonant (including ) in the previous syllable. The deaspirated consonants are then voiced between sonorants.

Writing systems

Meitei script

Meitei has its own script, which was used until the 18th century. Its earliest use is not known. Pamheiba, the ruler of the Manipur Kingdom who introduced Hinduism, banned the use of the Meitei script and adopted the Bengali script. Now in schools and colleges, the Bengali script is gradually being replaced by the Meitei script. The local organisations have played a major role in spreading awareness about their own script.

Many Meitei documents were destroyed at the beginning of the 18th century during the reign of Hindu converted King Pamheiba, under the instigation of the Bengali Hindu missionary, Shantidas Gosai.

Between 1709 and the middle of the 20th century, the Meitei language was written using the Bengali script. During the 1940s and 1950s, Meitei scholars began campaigning to bring back the Old Meitei (Old Manipuri) alphabet. In 1976 at a writers conference, all the scholars finally agreed on a new version of the alphabet containing a number of additional letters to represent sounds not present in Meitei when the script was first developed. The current Meitei alphabet is a reconstruction of the ancient Meitei script.

Since the early 1980s, the Meitei alphabet has been taught in schools in Manipur

It is a syllabic alphabet in which consonants all have an inherent vowel /a/. Other vowels are written as independent letters or by using diacritical marks that are written above, below, before or after the consonant they belong to. Each letter is named after a part of the human body.

Latin script

There exists an informal, but fairly consistent practical spelling of Meitei in Latin script. This spelling is used in the transcription of personal names and place names, and it is extensively used on the internet (Facebook, blogspots, etc.). It is also found in academic publications, for the spelling of Meitei book titles and the like (examples can be seen in the References, below). This spelling, on the whole, offers a transparent, unambiguous representation of the Meitei sound system, although the tones are usually not marked. It is practical in the sense that it does not use extra-alphabetical symbols, and can, therefore, be produced easily on any standard keyboard. The only point of ambiguity is found in the spelling of the vowels /ɐ/ and /a/, which are usually both written "a", except when they occur before an approximant (see table below). The vowel /a/ is sometimes written as "aa" to distinguish it from /ɐ/.

Bengali script

Meitei language in Bangladesh and India currently use the Bengali script, alongside the Meitei script.

Grammar

Sentences in the Meitei language use the format Subject + Object + Verb (SOV). For example, in the sentence ''Ei chak chai'' (ꯑꯩ ꯆꯥꯛ ꯆꯥꯢ), which translates to ''I eat rice'', the gloss is "ei" (I), "chak" (rice), "chai" (eat).

Number agreement

Agreement in nouns and pronouns is expressed to clarify singular and plural cases through the addition of the suffixes -khoi (for personal pronouns and human proper nouns) and -sing (for all other nouns). Verbs associated with the pluralised nouns are unaffected. Examples are demonstrated below:

When adjectives are used to be more clear, Meitei utilises separate words and does not add a suffix to the noun. Examples are show in the chart below:

Compound verbs

Compound verbs are created by combining root verbs each ending with aspect markers. While the variety of suffixes is high, all compound verbs utilise one of two:

Aspect markers appear as suffixes that clarify verb tense and appear at the end of the compound verb. Overall, the formula to construct a compound verb becomes oot verb+ uffix+ spect marker

Compound verbs can also be formed utilising both compound suffixes as well, allowing utterances such as ''pithokningle'' meaning "want to give out".

Number words

Literature

Linguistic tradition

The culture involved with the Meitei language is rooted deeply with pride and tradition based on having respect to the community elders. Young children who do not know about the tales that have been passed on from generation to generation are very rare. Regarding the history behind the ancient use of proverbs that defines the way conversation is held with the Meitei language, it is a way of expressing and telling stories and even using modern slang with old proverbs to communicate between one another.

The Meitei language had its own script. The history behind the Meitei language itself comes primarily from the ancient period of northeastern India.

Literary Awards

Media

All the Meitei newspapers will be using the Meitei script instead of the Bengali script from , according to a joint meeting consensus of the ''"Meetei Erol Eyek Loinasillol Apunba Lup"'' (MEELAL), ''"All Manipur Working Journalists’ Union"'' (AMWJU) and ''"Editors' Guild Manipur"'' (EGM) in Imphal.

Language Day

The ''Meitei Language Day'' (Meitei Longi Numit; /mei-tei lon-gee noo-meet/), also known as the '' Manipuri Language Day'' (Manipuri Longi Numit; /ma-nee-poo-ree lon-gee noo-meet/), is observed on 20 August every year, in memory of the day on which the language was included in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India and made one of the languages with official status in India on 20 August 1992.

Software

In 2021, Rudali Huidrom, a Manipuri researcher of the EBMT/NLP laboratory, Waseda University, Japan, created a text corpus named "EM Corpus" (shortened form of "Emalon Manipuri Corpus"). It is the first comparable text to text corpus built for Meitei language (mni) and English language (eng) pair from sentences. The writing system used for Meitei language in this corpus is Bengali script. It was crawled and collected from ''thesangaiexpress.com'' - the news website of "The Sangai Express", a daily newspaper of Manipur from August 2020 to 2021. In version 1, she created the monolingual data, having 1,034,715 Meitei language sentences and 846,796 English language sentences. In version 2, she created the monolingual data, having 1,880,035 Meitei language sentences and 1,450,053 English language sentences.

EM-ALBERT is the first ALBERT model available for Meitei language. EM-FT is also FastText word embedding available for Meitei language. These resources were created by Rudali Huidrom and are now available at free of cost at the European Language Resources Association catalogue (ELRA catalogue) under CC-BY-NC-4.0 license.

On 11 May 2022, Google Translate added Meitei-language (under the name ''"Meiteilon (Manipuri)"'') during its addition of 24 new languages to the translation tool. The writing system used for Meitei language in this tool is Meitei script.

Sample text

The following is a sample text in Modern Meitei of the Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations):

See also

* Languages of India
* List of languages by number of native speakers in India
* List of Manipuri poets
* Meitei inscriptions
* Meitei literature
* Meitei Language Day
* List of epics in Meitei language
* List of Sahitya Akademi Award winners for Meitei
* List of Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize winners for Meitei
* List of Yuva Puraskar winners for Meitei
* Vikaspedia

Footnotes

References

Further reading

* 1. ''A Short History of Kangleipak (Manipur) Part-I'', by Chingtamlen, 2005
* 2. ''A Short History of Kangleipak (Manipur) Part-II'', by Chingtamlen, 2007
* 3. ''A Short History of Kangleipak (Manipur) Part-III'', by Chingtamlen, 2008
* 4. ''The Meetei and the Bishnupriya'', by Chingtamlen, 2008

Culture

* Brara, N. Vijaylakshmi. (1998). ''Politics, society, and cosmology in India's North East''. Delphi: Oxford University Press.
* Budha, W. (1992). ''Indigenous games of the Meiteis''. Manipur: Wangkeimayum Publications.
* Kshetrimayum, Otojit. (2014). ''Ritual, Politics and Power in North East India: Contexualising the Lai Haraoba of Manipur''. Delhi: Ruby Press & Co.
* Singh, M. Kirti. (1988). ''Religion and culture of Manipur''. Delhi: Manas Publications.
* Singh, M. Kirti. (1993). ''Folk culture of Manipur''. Delhi: Manas Publications.
* Singh, Saikhom Gopal. (2014). ''The Meeteis of Manipur: A Study in Human Geography''. Delhi: Ruby Press & Co.

Language

* Bhat, D. N. S.; & Ningomba, S. (1997). ''Manipuri grammar''. Munich: Lincom Europa.
* Chelliah, Shobhana L. (1990). Experiencer subjects in Manipuri. In V. M. Manindra & K. P. Mohanan (Eds.), ''Experiencer subjects in South Asian languages'' (pp. 195–211). Stanford: The Center for the Study of Language and Information.
* Chelliah, Shobhana L. (1992). Tone in Manipuri. In K. L. Adams & T. J. Hudak (Eds.), ''Papers from the first annual meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 1991'' (pp. 65–85). Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University.
* Chelliah, Shobhana L. (1992). Bracketing paradoxes in Manipuri. In M. Aronoff (Ed.), ''Morphology now'' (pp. 33–47). Albany: State University of New York Press.
* Chelliah, Shobhana L. (1994). Morphological change and fast speech phenomena in the Manipuri verb. In K. L. Adams & T. J. Hudak (Eds.), ''Papers from the second annual meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 1992'' (pp. 121–134). Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University.
* Chelliah, Shobhana L. (1997). ''A grammar of Meitei''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. .
* Chelliah, Shobhana L. (2002). Early Meitei manuscripts. In C. I. Beckwith (Ed.), ''Medieval Tibeto-Burman languages: PIATS 2000: Tibetan studies: Proceedings of the ninth seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Leiden 2000'' (pp. 59–71). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.
* Chelliah, Shobhana L. (2002). A glossary of 39 basic words in archaic and modern Meitei. In C. I. Beckwith (Ed.), ''Medieval Tibeto-Burman languages: PIATS 2000: Tibetan studies: Proceedings of the ninth seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Leiden 2000'' (pp. 189–190). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.
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* Singh, Ningthoukhongjam Khelchandra. (1964). ''Manipuri to Manipuri & English dictionary''.

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Meitei Language

Official languages of India
Formal languages used for Indian scriptures
Languages of Manipur
Languages of Assam
Languages of Tripura
Languages of Nagaland
Languages of Bangladesh
Languages of Myanmar
Languages with own distinct writing systems
Languages written in Latin script
Languages officially written in Indic scripts
Lingua francas
Meitei culture
Meitei literature
Sahitya Akademi recognised languages
Standard languages
Subject–object–verb languages
Tonal languages
Unclassified Sino-Tibetan languages