Pnar (), also known as Jaiñtia is an
Austroasiatic 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 designed by Anna Daladier shows two major Pnar-speaking areas separated by a thin strip of
Khasi and
War-speaking areas. Together, the two Pnar areas encompass most of the
East Jaintia Hills,
West Jaintia Hills and
West Khasi Hills 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 corpuscompiled 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