Tangkhul: a short guide
Tangkhul is spoken across the villages of Ukhrul district in Manipur, and gives its name to a whole branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. It has been a written language since 1897.
The language
Tangkhul is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Tangkhulic branch, spoken in the villages of Ukhrul district, Manipur, in north-east India. Village varieties differ enough to have been described separately: doctoral grammars of the Kabonglo and Lairamlo varieties, for example, were completed at Assam University in 2019.
It became a written language in 1897, when the missionary William Pettigrew compiled a Tangkhul Primer and Catechism; he later published a Tangkhul Naga Grammar (1918). The Government of Manipur's Department of Language Planning and Implementation offers a cash award to people who learn Tangkhul, under its own terms and conditions.
Sounds
The vowels /i e a u/ can be pronounced as [ɪ ɛ ɐ ɯ] without changing the word, and the stops /p t tʃ k/ may be voiced (heard as b, d, j, g) in free variation, so the same word can sound slightly different from speaker to speaker. Tangkhul is written in the Latin alphabet; some spellings in the example data below use a macron, as in ā.
Example phrases
| English | Tangkhul |
|---|---|
| Thank you! | Ningshina hairei! |
| Should we help? | Ngachon haoshilla? |
| I'll help. | Ina ngachonrei. |
| one / two / three | akha / khani / kathum |
| water | tara |
| house | shim |
Sources and further reading
Grammar descriptions on this page are drawn from the reference material listed below and from the community phrase set behind the translator. Where the sources disagree with each other, or a speaker's correction disagrees with both, the speaker's usage is followed.
- Tangkhul language: classification, history of writing, phonology and further reading
- Pettigrew, William (1918), *Tangkhul Naga Grammar*: Shillong: Assam Secretariat Press
- Tangkhul–English sentence pairs: public dataset on Hugging Face
- Marrison (1967) word list, via Lexibank: CC BY 4.0