Singpho is a dialect of the

Jingpho language Jingpho (''Jinghpaw'', ''Chingp'o'', ''Jìngphòʔ gà'' / ဈိာင်ဖေါစ်) or Kachin ( my, ကချင်ဘာသာ, ), is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sal branch mainly spoken in Kachin State, Burma and Yunnan, China. T ...

spoken by the Singpho people of

Arunachal Pradesh Arunachal Pradesh (, ) is a state in Northeastern India. It was formed from the erstwhile North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) region, and became a state on 20 February 1987. It borders the states of Assam and Nagaland to the south. It share ...

and

Assam Assam (; ) is a state in northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . The state is bordered by Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh to the north; Nagaland and Manipur ...

India India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...

. It is spoken by at least 3,000 people. "Singpho" is the local pronunciation of "Jingpho". The Jingpho/Singpho (Jinghpaw, Chingp'o), or Kachin, language is a Tibeto-Burman language mainly spoken in Kachin State,

Myanmar Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...

and

Yunnan Province Yunnan , () is a landlocked province in the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the C ...

, China. The term Kachin language can refer either to the Jingpho language or to a group of languages spoken by various ethnic groups in the same region as Jingpho:

Lisu Lisu may refer to: *Lisu people, an ethnic group of Southeast Asia *Lisu language, spoken by the Lisu people * Old Lisu Alphabet or Fraser Alphabet *Lisu syllabary *Lisu (Unicode block), the block of Unicode characters for the Lisu language. * Lisu ...

, Lachit, Rawang,

Zaiwa Zaiwa (autonym: '; Tsaiwa, Tsaiva, 载瓦; Burmese: ဇိုင်ဝါး/အဇီး) is a Burmish language spoken in parts of southwest China and eastern Burma. There are around 100,000 speakers. It is also known as ''Atsi'', its name in ...

, Lhaovo, Achang (Ngo Chang), and Jingpho. These languages are from distinct branches of the highest level of the Tibeto-Burman family. The total estimated native speakers are 950,000 (2001 census). Singpho is spoken the eastern extreme of northeastern

, such as Bordumsa Circle, Tirap District,

, and also in nearby parts of

Lohit District Lohit () is an administrative district in the state of Arunachal Pradesh in India. The district headquarters is located at Tezu. As of 2011 it is the third most populous district of Arunachal Pradesh, after Papum Pare and Changlang. Etymolog ...

. Singpho lacks the system of person-number

agreement Agreement may refer to: Agreements between people and organizations * Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law * Trade agreement, between countries * Consensus, a decision-making process * Contract, enforceable in a court of law ** Meeting of ...

on an auxiliary particle found in the other dialects of Jingpho. DeLancey attributes this to

creolization Creolization is the process through which creole languages and cultures emerge. Creolization was first used by linguists to explain how contact languages become creole languages, but now scholars in other social sciences use the term to describe ...

"in the broad sense", as a simplification brought about by a large population of enslaved

Assamese Assamese may refer to: * Assamese people, a socio-ethnolinguistic identity of north-eastern India * People of Assam, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic and multi-religious people of Assam * Assamese language, one of the easternmost Indo-Aryan language ...

rice farmers learning Singpho as a second language.

References

External links

Singpho dictionary
(

SEAlang library The SEAlang Library, established in 2005 as an online library source for Southeast Asian linguistic reference materials, was initially funded from the Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) program of the U. ...

) Languages of China Languages of Myanmar Sal languages Endangered languages of India Languages of Assam Languages of Arunachal Pradesh {{Assam-stub