The Digaro (Digarish), Northern Mishmi (Mishmic), or Kera'a–Tawrã languages are a possible small family of possibly

Sino-Tibetan languages 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 ...

spoken by the Mishmi people of southeastern

Tibet Tibet (; ''Böd''; ), or Greater Tibet, is a region in the western part of East Asia, covering much of the Tibetan Plateau and spanning about . It is the homeland of the Tibetan people. Also resident on the plateau are other ethnic groups s ...

and

Arunachal Pradesh Arunachal Pradesh (; ) is a States and union territories of India, state in northeast India. It was formed from the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) region, and India declared it as a state on 20 February 1987. Itanagar is its capital and la ...

. The languages are Idu and Taraon (Digaro, Darang). Lexical similarities are restricted to centain semantic fields, so a relationship between them is doubtful.

External relationships

They are not related to the Southern Mishmi Midzu languages, apart from possibly being Sino-Tibetan. However, Blench and Post (2011) suggests that they may not even be Sino-Tibetan, but rather an independent language family of their own. Blench (2014) classifies the Digaro languages as part of the Greater Siangic group of languages.

Names

Autonyms and exonyms for Digaro-speaking peoples, as well as Miju (Kaman), are given below (Jiang, et al. 2013:2-3).

Registers

Idu, Tawra,

Kman KMAN (1350 AM) is a radio station broadcasting a News Talk format. Licensed to Manhattan, Kansas, United States, the station serves the Salina-Manhattan area. The station is currently owned by Manhattan Broadcasting Co. and features programing ...

, and Meyor all share a system of multiple language registers, which are (Blench 2016): #ordinary speech #speech of hunters: lexical substitution, the replacement of animal names and others by special lexical forms, and sometimes short poems #speech of priests/shamans: more complex, involving much language which is difficult to understand, and also lengthy descriptions of sacrificial animals #poetic/lyrical register (not in Idu, but appears in

) #mediation register (only in Idu?) #babytalk register

References

* Blench, Roger (2011
''(De)classifying Arunachal languages: Reconstructing the evidence''
* Blench, Roger (2014).
Fallen leaves blow away: a neo-Hammarstromian approach to Sino-Tibetan classification
'. Presentation given at the University of New England, Armidale, 6 September 2014. * Blench, Roger. 2017
The ‘Mishmi’ languages, Idu, Tawra and Kman: a mismatch between cultural and linguistic relations
* Jiang Huo ��获 Li Daqin ��大勤 Sun Hongkai ��宏开(2013). ''A study of Taraon'' ��让语研 Beijing: Ethnic Publishing House ��族出版社 * van Driem, George (2001) ''Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region.'' Brill. {{Arunachal languages Greater Siangic languages * Languages of India Proposed language families