Digaro languages
Language family of Tibet and northeast India
title: "Digaro languages" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["digaro-languages", "greater-siangic-languages", "mishmi-languages", "languages-of-india", "proposed-language-families"] description: "Language family of Tibet and northeast India" topic_path: "linguistics" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digaro_languages" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Language family of Tibet and northeast India ::
::data[format=table title="Infobox language family"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| name | Digarish |
| altname | Northern Mishmic |
| region | Arunachal Pradesh |
| familycolor | Sino-Tibetan |
| fam1 | possibly Sino-Tibetan or an independent family |
| fam2 | Greater Siangic ? |
| child1 | Idu Mishmi |
| child2 | Taraon |
| glotto | mish1241 |
| glottorefname | Digarish |
| :: |
|name=Digarish |altname=Northern Mishmic |region=Arunachal Pradesh |familycolor=Sino-Tibetan |fam1=possibly Sino-Tibetan or an independent family |fam2=Greater Siangic ? |child1=Idu Mishmi |child2=Taraon |glotto=mish1241 |glottorefname=Digarish
The Digaro (Digarish), Northern Mishmi (Mishmic), or Kera'a–Tawrã languages are a possible small family of possibly Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by the Mishmi people of southeastern Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh.
The languages are Idu and Taraon (Digaro, Darang). Lexical similarities are restricted to certain semantic fields, so a relationship between them is doubtful.
External relationships
They are not related to the Southern Mishmi Miju 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).
::data[format=table title="Names of Mishmi peoples"]
| Taraon name | Kaman name | Idu name | Assamese name | Taraon people | Kaman people | Idu people | Zha people 扎人 | Tibetan people |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| da31 raŋ53 | tɕi31 moŋ35 | tɑ31 rɑŋ35 | Digaru; | |||||
| Digaru Mishmi | ||||||||
| tɕɑu53 | kɯ31 mɑn35 | mi31 tɕu55 | Midzu | |||||
| dju55; | ||||||||
| dju55 ta31 rɑŋ53; | ||||||||
| dɑi53 | min31 dɑu55; | |||||||
| hu53 | i53 du55 | Chulikata Mishmi | ||||||
| tɕɑ31 kʰen55 | tɕɑ31 kreŋ35 | — | — | |||||
| lɑ31 mɑ55; | ||||||||
| mei53 bom55 | dɯ31 luŋ35; | |||||||
| hɑi35 hɯl55 | ɑ31 mi53; | |||||||
| pu53; | ||||||||
| mi31 si55 pu53 | — | |||||||
| :: |
Registers
Idu, Tawra, Kman, 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 Kman)
- 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 [江获], Li Daqin [李大勤], Sun Hongkai [孙宏开] (2013). A study of Taraon [达让语研]. Beijing: Ethnic Publishing House [民族出版社].
- van Driem, George (2001) Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region. Brill.
References
- DeLancey, Scott. (2021). "The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia". De Gruyter.
- Blench, R.M. 2024. The ‘Mishmi’ languages, Idu, Tawrã and Kman: a mismatch between cultural and linguistic relations. In: Movements through Time and Space: Ecology and Lingua-Cultural Change in South and Southeast Asia. Nishant Choksi ed. Guwahati: Pragjyotish Centre for Cultural Research.
- "(PDF) Mishmi language development {{!}} Roger Blench - Academia.edu".
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::