Atong language (Sino-Tibetan)

In India, the Atongs are considered to belong to the Garo Tribe,[9] however, they speak a distinct language,[9][5] which, however, has no official status of its own. The Atong people are members of the Garo Scheduled Tribe, whose official Scheduled tribe language is Garo. Garo has a standardised form of speech used in education, administration, the press and literature.[3] Linguistically speaking, Atong and Standard Garo may be different languages, given that they have different sound systems, vocabulary and grammar. However, due to the fact that most Atongs are bilingual in Standard Garo to various degrees, intelligibility is one-way: Atong speakers understand Standard Garo but speakers of Standard Garo may not understand Atong.[3]

Glottalization in Atong is a feature that operates on the level of the syllable, and that manifests itself as a glottal stop at the end of the syllable. Glottalization only affects open syllables and syllables ending in a continuant or a vowel. In the following examples, glottalized syllables are indicated by a following bullet. The pronunciation is given between square brackets where the symbol ⟨ʔ⟩ represents the glottal stop and the full stop represents the syllable boundary.

In the examples below, the following abbreviations are used: COS 'change of state', CUST 'customary aspect', INCOM 'incompletive aspect', NEG 'negative',

If the glottalized continuant is followed by a consonant, the glottalized phoneme is not released, i.e. man’ -khu-cha [manʔ.kʰutɕa] (be.able-INCOM-NEG)‘is not yet possible’.

If the glottalized continuant is followed by a vowel, it is released and the release repeats the continuant so that it can be said to act like the onset of the following syllable, e.g. man’ -ok [manʔ.nok] (be.able-COS) ‘was able’.

In a glottalized syllable with final /l/ the glottal stop usually precedes the oral closure of the [l] when followed by another vowel, e.g. mel’ -a [meʔ.la] (be.fat-CUST)‘is fat’. This phenomenon also happens, but less frequently, with syllables ending in /m/, e.g. nom’ -a [noʔ.ma ~ nomʔ.ma] (be.soft-CUST) ‘is soft’.

Atong has six vowel qualities occurring in the native vocabulary as well as in loanwords: /i e a ə o u/. In addition, there are four long vowels which are only found in loanwords from English and Indic languages. These are usually pronounced longer than the indigenous vowels: /iː/ [iː ~ i], /eː/ [eː ~ e], /aː/ [aː ~ a] and /oː/ [oː ~ o]. In the orthography, long vowels are represented by double letters. Note that /uː/ and /əː/ are not attested.

Examples of minimal pairs and near minimal pairs are given in the table below.

The difference between the loan and the indigenous words is a matter of vowel quality. In closed syllables, where Atong vowels would be pronounced lowered and more retracted, the loan vowels will have the same quality as the Atong vowels in open syllables. Not all loan words that have long vowels in the source language have long vowels in Atong, and not all loans that can be pronounced with a long vowel in Atong have a long vowel in the source language.

The canonical syllable structure of Atong is (C)V(C), where C stands for any consonant and V for any vowel. This structure can be maintained if words like mai 'rice', askui 'star' and chokhoi 'fishing basket' are analysed as containing a vowel and a final glide (see glide (linguistics)). The glide, presented by the letter i, is the coda of the syllable rather than an element of the nucleus. In phonemic writing the words would look like this: /maj/, /askuj/, /t͡ɕokʰoj/.

There are two glides in the language: /w/ and /j/. The glide /w/ occurs in both syllable initial and syllable final position, e.g. wak 'pig' and saw 'rotten, fermented' respectively. The glide /j/ occurs only syllable finally, e.g. tyi /təj/ 'water'. Traditional words with the structure CVVC do not exist, e.g. *gaut or *main (where the asterisk [*] indicates the non-existence of these words).

If a diphthong is defined as two vowels that can occur in the nucleus of a syllable, then Atong has no diphthongs. There are words that are written with two adjacent vowel graphemes or letters, e.g. mai 'rice', askui 'star', and chokhoi 'fishing basket'. However, the letter i in these words represents a consonant phoneme, viz. the off glide /j/ (see Table 1). The writing system uses the letter i in this way because the letters j and y are both used to represent other phonemes.[8]