Lyngngam is an Austroasiatic language of

Northeast India Northeast India, officially the North Eastern Region (NER), is the easternmost region of India representing both a geographic and political Administrative divisions of India, administrative division of the country. It comprises eight States and ...

closely related to

Khasic languages The Khasic or Khasian languages are a family of Austroasiatic languages native to the Shillong Plateau and spoken by the Khasi, Pnar and other related ethnic groups. Most of them reside in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya where Kha ...

. Once listed as a dialect of Khasi, Lyngngam has in recent literature been classified as a distinct language and believed to be former Garo speakers. Lyngngam speakers have food and dress similar to the neighboring

Garo people The Garo people are a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group who live mostly in the Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya, with a smaller number in neighbouring Bangladesh. They are the second-largest indigenous people in Meghalaya after the Khasi and c ...

, who consider the ancestors of speakers of the Lyngngam language to belong to the Garo Megam tribe. Some speakers of Lyngngam still use surnames which originate from the Garo language.

Phonology

Consonant inventory

The following table lists the consonants attested in Lyngngam. : The main difference with the Khasi language is that Lyngngam does not possess the voiced aspirated series. Furthermore, Lyngngam does not have the phoneme . Words which have in Khasi typically have or in Lyngngam, as in the following pairs of

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the s ...

s: :

Vowel inventory

The following table lists the vowel inventory of the language. The only vowels showing a length distinction are and , in contradistinction to Khasi, where length is distinctive for all vowels. : Words with diphthongs in Khasi have monophthongs in Lyngngam, as in the following pairs of cognates: :

References

* {{Hill tribes of Northeast India Khasian languages Languages of India Languages of Meghalaya