Documentation of Rengmitca (Tibeto-Burman)

Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

Investigators

Abstract

Rengmitca is a highly endangered Tibeto-Burman language currently spoken by fewer than fifty individuals along a tributary of the Matamuhuri river in Southeastern Bangladesh. Study of the language is crucial because its core vocabulary exhibits a number of conservative features for a Tibeto-Burman language: Rengmitca retains not only consonants that the Tibeto-Burman parent language had at the ends of its words, but also prefixal elements which most modern languages have lost. Rengmitca may thus act as an independent source for verifying hypotheses about the parent language. The relationship through contact of the language to a second language, Mru, which all Rengmitca speakers have as their primary language, is also of particular theoretical interest. This project will collect as much data as possible for the language before it disappears. Project members will gather a corpus of texts representing different genres from the remaining speakers. Using collected text material and other investigative methods, a lexicon of essential Rengmitca items will be assembled. The project will attempt to provide a detailed phonology and sketch grammar for the language. The project will archive documentary materials for the language at Dartmouth College and with The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures.