Kanashi is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in the isolated Malana (Malani) village area in

Kullu District Kullu is a district in Himachal Pradesh, India. It borders Rampur district to the south, Mandi and Kangra districts to the west, and the Lahaul and Spiti district to the north and east. The largest valley in this mountainous district is the ...

Himachal Pradesh Himachal Pradesh (; ; "Snow-laden Mountain Province") is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the thirteen mountain states and is characterized by an extreme landscape featuring several peaks ...

, India. It is, to some extent mutually intelligible with other Sino-Tibetan language like kinnauri.

Sociolinguistic situation

Currently there are roughly 1700 active speakers of Kanashi in the Malana Nala which is up from the previous estimate of 1400 in the early 2000s. Its current status to date is threatened. The village that uses this language is located roughly 10,000 feet above sea level isolated from civilization.

Simple sentences

It seems apparent that speakers of Kanashi favor simple sentences over

complex Complex commonly refers to: * Complexity, the behaviour of a system whose components interact in multiple ways so possible interactions are difficult to describe ** Complex system, a system composed of many components which may interact with each ...

and compound sentences due to the sporadic usage of the later two. Kanashi speakers use both subject–verb–object order and subject–object–verb order. The interesting fact about Kanashi is that being a pro normalized language it doesn't require the subject and verb to be mentioned separately, particularity in 1st and 2nd person when these are incorporated in the verb form itself.D. D. Sharma, Tribal Languages of Himachal Pradesh Part-Two
''Mittal Publications'', 1992

Gender

In Kanashi there seems to be a lack of

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...

. The natural gender that has no bearing on the other constituents within an utterance is distinguished in one of two ways. The first is to use distinct terms for groups of males and females and second is by prefixing terms with the meaning father or mother to the substantive in question. In addition, gender distinction occurs only among humans – all inanimate and animate non-human objects tend to be genderless.

Numbers

Kanashi tends to use mostly

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not c ...

s and

verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

s. Pronominal and nominal stems are inflected for two numbers, viz. singular and plural only. If desired the dual number can be indicated as "nis" for two as in two men. The absence of a plural marker indicates singularity in Kanashi however, in non formal speech the plural marker is left out too because it is inferred from the context of the sentence. Plural marker suffixes are also left out if numerals other than the numeral for one or by terms such as many, several, all, some, a few, etc. The numeral system also uses a unique form to represent a base ten system. Twenty is stated as twice ten and forty is twice twice ten.T. C. Hodson, Note on the Numeral Systems of the Tibeto-Burman Dialects, ''Jstor'', 1913

Sociolinguistic situation

Simple sentences

Gender

Numbers

References

Further reading