The Galo language is a

Sino-Tibetan Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 ...

language of the Tani group, spoken by the Galo people. Its precise position within Tani is not yet certain, primarily because of its central location in the Tani area and the strong effects of intra-Tani contacts on the development of Tani languages. It is an endangered language according to the general definitions, but prospects for its survival are better than many similarly-placed languages in the world.

Dialects

The major Galo dialects are Pugo, spoken around the district capital

Aalo Aalo, formerly Along, is a census town and headquarters of the West Siang district of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. It is located from Likabali, which is at the border of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. It is also an Advance Landing Gr ...

; Lare, spoken to the south of

; and a dialect that can be called Kargu kardi, pertaining to the dialect spoken in the northwest near the Tagin area. There may be additional Galo dialects further north, which remains largely unresearched. There are numerous subdialects that often correspond to regional or clan groupings. Neighbouring languages include Assamese, Nepali,

Bodo Bodo may refer to: Ethnicity * Boro people, also called ''Bodo'', an ethno-linguistic group mainly from Northwest Assam, India * Bodo-Kachari people, an umbrella group from Nepal, India and Bangladesh that includes the Boro people Culture an ...

, Mising, Minyong, Hills Miri, Tagin, Nishi, Bori,

Pailibo Bokar or Bokar-Ramo (; ) is a Tani language spoken by the Lhoba in West Siang district, Arunachal Pradesh, India (Megu 1990) and Nanyi Township 南伊珞巴民族乡, Mainling County, Tibet Autonomous Region, China (Ouyang 1985). The Ramo dial ...

, Ramo and

Bokar Lhoba (English translation: ; ; ) is any of a diverse amalgamation of Sino-Tibetan-speaking tribespeople living in and around Pemako, a region in southeastern Tibet including Mainling, Medog and Zayü counties of Nyingchi and Lhünzê Count ...

. Post (2007:46) lists a provisional classification of Galo dialects. *Galòo **Karkòo? **Gensìi? **Taíi(podia) ***(branch) ***Zɨrdóo ****(branch) ****Larèe, Puugóo Post (2013) reclassified Karko as a variety of Bori.

Grammar

Like most central and eastern Tani languages, Galo is largely

synthetic Synthetic may refer to: Science * Synthetic biology * Synthetic chemical or compound, produced by the process of chemical synthesis * Synthetic elements, chemical elements that are not naturally found on Earth and therefore have to be created in ...

and

agglutinating An agglutinative language is a type of language that primarily forms words by stringing together morphemes (word parts)—each typically representing a single grammatical meaning—without significant modification to their forms ( agglutinations) ...

. Two primary

lexical tone Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis ...

s are present – High and Low – which may reflect two Proto-Tani syllable tones; in modern Galo, the surface TBU (Tone-Bearing Unit) is the usually polysyllabic phonological word. A robust

finite Finite may refer to: * Finite set, a set whose cardinality (number of elements) is some natural number * Finite verb, a verb form that has a subject, usually being inflected or marked for person and/or tense or aspect * "Finite", a song by Sara Gr ...

/non-finite asymmetry underlies Galo grammar, and clause chaining and

nominalization In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation, also known as nouning, is the use of a word that is not a noun (e.g., a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head (linguistics), head of a noun phrase. This change in functional c ...

are both rampant. No synchronic verb-serialization appears to exist, although what seems to have been proto-verb-serialization has developed into a very large and productive system of derivational suffixes to bound verbal roots. Major (non-derived) lexical classes are noun, adjective and verb. Other grammatical features include

postposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...

s, relator nouns, classifiers, an extremely large system of aspectual suffixes, and a rich set of constituent-final particles coding functions related to epistemological status (such as evidentiality), discourse/pragmatic status, modality, and other related functions. Case-marking is basically

accusative In grammar, the accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "her", " ...

; ergativity has not been found.

Morphology

Galo is a language where the verbs are complex. This is called predicate-centric. They can have lots of parts added to them, which changes their meaning. Nouns, on the other hand, are pretty simple because they have less prefixes. Some Galo words are short, but they might be parts of longer words that aren't used anymore. Some word parts (bound morphemes) can only be used with other parts (free morphemes), and some stick to words like little tags to change the meaning of the whole phrase (suffixes, affixes, infixes, clitics etc.).

Education

Galo language is taught as third language in schools of areas dominated by Galo community.

Dialects

Grammar

Morphology

Education

See also

References

Further reading