Tangkhul is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Tangkhulic branch, spoken in different villages of Ukhrul district,

Manipur Manipur () is a state in northeastern India with Imphal as its capital. It borders the Indian states of Assam to the west, Mizoram to the south, and Nagaland to the north and shares the international border with Myanmar, specifically t ...

, India. The term "Tangkhul" is derived from the

Meitei language Meitei (; ) also known as Manipuri ), is a Tibeto-Burman language of northeast India. It is the official language and the lingua franca of Manipur and an additional official language in four districts of Assam. It is one of the scheduled ...

terms, (, ) and (, ). According to another theory, the term "Tangkhul" is derived from "Thankhul", meaning "Than village" in

. Tangkhul became a

written language A written language is the representation of a language by means of writing. This involves the use of visual symbols, known as graphemes, to represent linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes, or words. However, written language is ...

for the first time in the year 1897, when William Pettigrew compiled ''"Tangkhul Primer and Catechism"'', during his Christian missionary activities. The

Department of Language Planning and Implementation Directorate of Language Planning and Implementation (DLPI) is a directorate of the Government of Manipur in charge of the language planning and the implementation of language policy. The first anniversary of the Directorate of Language Plan ...

of the Government of Manipur offers a sum of , to every individual who learns Tangkhul language, under certain terms and conditions. Tangkhul shares 93%–94%

lexical similarity In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. ...

with the Somra variety of Tangkhul, 31% with Tangkhul Naga spoken in India, 51%–52% with Akyaung Ari Naga, and 29%–32% with Koki Naga.

Phonology

Consonants

* Stop sounds /p t tʃ k/ may have voiced allophones d dʒ ɡin free variation. * /m/ may be heard as �when preceding /f/ or /ʋ/. * /r/ can be heard as or �in free variation.

Vowels

* /i e a u/ can have allophone sounds of � ɛ ɐ ɯin free variation.

References

{{Languages of Northeast India Tangkhulic languages Languages of Manipur Languages of Nagaland