Pnar (), also known as Jaiñtia is an

Austroasiatic The Austroasiatic languages ( ) are a large language family spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority popu ...

language spoken in

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

and

Bangladesh Bangladesh, officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, eighth-most populous country in the world and among the List of countries and dependencies by ...

Geographic distribution

As a Khasic language, Pnar belongs to a complex

dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulat ...

which includes mixed varieties whose exact relations remain a matter of debate among linguists. A language map of

Meghalaya Meghalaya (; "the abode of clouds") is a states and union territories of India, state in northeast India. Its capital is Shillong. Meghalaya was formed on 21 January 1972 by carving out two districts from the Assam: the United Khasi Hills an ...

War War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organi ...

-speaking areas. Together, the two Pnar areas encompass most of the East Jaintia Hills, West Jaintia Hills and

West Khasi Hills West Khasi Hills is an administrative district in the state of Meghalaya in India. History The West Khasi Hills district was carved out of the Khasi Hills district, which was divided into West and East Khasi Hills districts on 28 October 1976. ...

districts. A more recent map designed by Hiram Ring for a Khasic languages handbook by Paul Sidwell relies on a different classification. There, only the former two districts are labeled as Pnar, whereas the varieties spoken in the West Khasi Hills belong to Maharam, a related but distinct language. Both maps also show small pockets of Pnar speakers in the neighboring state of

Assam Assam (, , ) is a state in Northeast India, northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra Valley, Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . It is the second largest state in Northeast India, nor ...

, In the former map, they are limited to the area directly adjacent to Meghalaya, whereas the latter map also shows a group of Pnar-speaking villages around Haflong.

Phonology

Pnar has 30 phonemes: 7 vowels and 23 consonants. Other sounds listed below are phonetic realizations. The sounds in brackets are phonetic realizations and the sounds in slashes are phonemes.

Vowels

There is also one diphthong: .

Consonants

Syllable structure

Syllables in Pnar can consist of a single nucleic vowel. Maximally, they can include a complex onset of two consonants, a diphthong nucleus, and a coda consonant. A second type of syllable contains a syllabic nasal/trill/lateral immediately following the onset consonant. This syllabic consonant behaves as the rhyme. (Ring, 2012: 141–2)

References

* *

External links

* http://projekt.ht.lu.se/rwaai RWAAI (Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage) * http://hdl.handle.net/10050/00-0000-0000-0003-D187-C@view Pnar in RWAAI Digital Archive
Pnar DoReCo corpus
compiled by Hiram Ring. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations. {{Austroasiatic languages Khasian languages Languages of Bangladesh Languages of Meghalaya