A pronominal dual formative derivable from *tsi, *ntsi, or *tsiŋ is attested sufficiently broadly across the Tibeto-Burman languages to require that these be reconstructed to the proto-language. In most of these languages only one of these forms occurs, and combines with pronouns to form compositional duals. However, several languages show clear association of *tsi with inclusive dual, and *ntsi with second person dual; there is also some evidence for an originally exclusive value of *tsiŋ. This paper presents the comparative evidence for these, with evidence from various clades supporting the reconstructed person values of the three forms, and suggests a preliminary account of the develoments which have resulted in the replacement in most languages of the original 3-term paradigm with compositional forms.

This paper presents a phonological sketch Maring, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in southeastern part of Manipur in Northeast India. It begins by highlighting some of the previous works done in Maring. Then it goes on to describe the phonemic inventory of the consonants, vowels and tones, as well as the syllable structure and the phonotactics. The paper also highlights some prevalent morphophonological processes occurring in the language. In the absence of a standard writing system, many disyllabic words are becoming monosyllabic both in the spoken form as well as in written form. This sometimes leads to form consonant clusters. Thus, this paper attempts to describe the sound system of Maring and bring forth some of the prevalent sound changes happening in the language. This will be helpful to the community for developing orthography and grammars, and for those working on the phonology, sound change, historical linguistics etc of the lesser known and less described languages of Northeast India.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of reduplication in Khiamniungan, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Northeast India and parts of Myanmar. Reduplication in Khiamniungan is common across worrd classes. The study identifies and categorizes four primary reduplicative strategies: (1) echo formations, where partial reduplication creates semantically modified words; (2) compounding reduplication, in which morphologically independent stems combine to form new lexical items; (3) full reduplication, used for emphasis, pluralization, quantification, and manner marking; and (4) expressive reduplication, which encodes sensory and onomatopoeic meanings. The paper highlights the syntactic and semantic functions of reduplicated forms, illustrating their role in quantification, habitual aspect marking, imperative constructions, and intensification. While complete reduplication is pervasive across word classes, partial reduplication and echo formations are comparatively less common but still attested. Additionally, Khiamniungan exhibits a robust system of expressive reduplication that encodes sensory perception, aligning with patterns observed in other Tibeto-Burman languages. This study contributes to the broader understanding of reduplication in the Patkaian (Northern Naga) linguistic subgroup and sheds light on typological features relevant to Tibeto-Burman languages as a whole.

This paper is a preliminary description of the phonology of Sherdukpen language, which is spoken in Rupa, a valley town in the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh. Sherdukpen is a highly endangered language with a population of around 4000 speakers in total (Eberhard et al. 2021). The language has not been adequately described and documented yet (cf. Jacquesson 2015). The analysis of the language is based on the data collected in my recent field visit to Rupa in December 2021. This paper presents a description of the segmental inventories and the syllable structure of Sherdukpen. The consonant inventory consists of 23 consonants. Twelve of them are plosives, six fricatives, three approximants, three nasals and a trill. There are three series of stops: voiced, voiceless and voiceless aspirated. Sherdukpen has twenty two vowels among which five of them are nasal vowels five are secondary and one nasal secondary vowels.

This contribution introduces Kongai, a hitherto unreported Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Manipur, North-East India. This field report contains introductory sociolinguistic notes and preliminary information on Kongai phonological properties, such as syllable structure, rhymes, and prefixes. Additional linguistic data include the pronominal paradigm, comparative lexical materials, and a 100-items Swadesh wordlist.

This paper provides an overview of Pangkhua, a South Central Tibeto-Burman (Kuki-Chin) language of Bangladesh. Pangkhua is an underdocumented and a largely endangered language spoken by about 2000 people in Rangamati District, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. In this overview, first, I examine Pangkhua’s position in the internal subclassifications of the South Central subgroup and show that its position in the subgroup is not as obvious as has often been regarded. Then, I discuss some of Pangkhua’s basic and typologically important characteristics including phonology, morphology, and syntax. As a first account of Pangkhua, this overview will facilitate areal-typological as well as historical and comparative South Central Tibeto-Burman linguistics research.  

This paper describes a phenomenon prevalent in South Central Tibeto-Burman languages, which we call multi-functional deictics (MFDs). Descriptively, MFDs are demonstratives that appear in multiple positions in the noun phrase, typically at the left edge and the right edge. They often co-occur and match in form, resulting in an apparent circumfix. MFDs are distinct from double definiteness or the reinforcer construction in Romance and Germanic languages, where a demonstrative co-occurs with a determiner or emphatic. In the case of MFDs, the two forms are both demonstratives, often identical. We find that MFDs are prevalent in South Central Tibeto-Burman. However, even the most basic questions about MFDs remain to be answered, such as whether their core meaning derives from distance in space, evidentiality, or something else; and what syntactic structures result in the two distinct positions. We provide a range of hypotheses for these questions and outline what kind of data is needed to test those hypotheses. Additionally, we find significant variation within South Central Tibeto-Burman in the specific properties of MFD. More broadly, MFDs provide an important test case for noun phrase syntax that has complex interactions with other grammatical phenomena like case marking.

Liangmai, a Tibeto-Burman member spoken in North East India (NEI), has twenty consonant phonemes and six vowel phonemes with four contrastive tones. Three stops and three nasals permitted at the end of a syllable and all consonants occurs at the beginning of a syllable. A voiceless libio-dental fricative which is rare in other NEI languages is a major consonant. Vowel system has several diphthongs. The close central unrounded vowel /ɨ/ can appear as an allophone of close front unrounded vowel /i/ and close back rounded vowel /u/ as in dūip í n ~ dūip ɨ́ n ‘spring’ and t ū n ~ t ɨ̄ n ‘push’. With or without coda, the position nucleus of a syllable is occupied by an obligatory vowel and also by a syllabic consonant. Syllable has  CV and CVC patterns.  After resllabification, the structure of the syllable will appear like CCVC. Consonnat cluster is not permitted in a syllable except for a few idiolects. Nasal syllabic is abundantly present in the language. Total assimiliation occurs in phonological proces in the manner of progressive and regressive assimiliation. Both consonant and vowel undergoes syncope. Epenthesis does not occur at word level except for loan words. In fast speech, voiceless consonants are voiced inter-vocally across morphemes. The morpheme /jēi/ can be realized in six allomorphs depending on the envriornment they occur, which due to morphophonological process. The tonal system has four contrastive level of tone. Register tones are plenty and contour tones are rare.

The present paper is an attempt to describe and analyse the structure of causatives in Hmar, a Kuki-Chin subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman language family, spoken by around 98,550 speakers as per the Census of India, 2011. This paper discusses the two types of causatives in the language: Morphological and Lexical. Hmar has two morphological causative forms, viz the prefix /sùk-/ and suffix /-tìr/, that are productively employed in the derivation of causative structures. Lexical causatives, on the other hand, are uncommon and unproductive. The language is found to have a handful of causative forms that can be considered as fragments of the historical causative morphology. However, they are discussed under lexical causatives as they are irregular and no longer productive as a morphological operation. The paper further discusses the phenomenon of double causation in the language and identifies two patterns of deriving double causative structures.

There is a new theory that Burushaski is related to Kartvelian, put forward by Holst (2017). Čašule (2017), published in this journal, made various statements about this new theory. Čašule says that he is not convinced by it and seeks to explain why he is not. Unfortunately, his assessment contains a number of misunderstandings, statements which do not entirely match the facts of Holst (2017), and other features which can be regarded as problematic. In addition, there are many issues on which divided opinions are possible. Given this, the present paper is intended to react to Čašule (2017). While doing this, new issues come into the debate.