Bodo language

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Bodo
Spoken in:	India, with a few small communities in Nepal
Total speakers:	603,000: 600,000 in India (1997), 3,301 in Nepal (2001)
Language family:	Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman Jingpho-Konyak-Bodo Konyak-Bodo-Garo Bodo-Garo Bodo
Official status
Official language of:	Assam (India)
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`sit`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	`brx`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Bodo is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Bodo people of north-eastern India and Nepal. The language is one of the official languages of the Indian state of Assam, and is one of 22 scheduled languages given a special constitutional status in India.

1 Classification and related languages
2 History
3 Dialects
4 Script
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Classification and related languages

Bodo language, a branch of the Tibeto-Burman family of language is a rich language. It is a major language of the Bodo group under the Assam-Burmese group of language. It shares some common features in respect of vocabulary, phonology, morphology and syntax with other sister languages of the Bodo group.

It is closely related to the Dimasa language of Assam and the Garo language of Meghalaya. It is also a very closely related language of Kokborok language spoken in Tripura.

[edit] History

In the aftermath of socio-political awakening and movement launched by the Bodo organizations since 1913, the language was introduced as the medium of instruction (1963) in the primary schools in Bodo dominated areas. Now a day the language has been recognized as the medium of instruction up to the secondary level and an associate official language in the state of Assam. The language has attained a position of pride with the opening of the Post-Graduate course in Bodo language and literature in the University of Guwahati in 1996. The Bodo language has to its credit large number of books on poetry, drama, short story, novel, biography, travelogue, children's literature and literary criticism.

[edit] Dialects

Chote, Mech. Related to Dimasa, Tripuri, Lalunga, Boro.

[edit] Script

The language is officially written using the Devanagari script, although it also has a long history of using the Roman script. Some researchers have suggested that the language originally used a now-lost script called Deodhai.^{[citation needed]}