Dumi Analyzed Texts: Story collection in Dumi
(with Grammar Sketch)
Netra Mani Rai
This volume is a compilation of a brief introduction to the Dumi people, a grammatical sketch and analyzed texts in Dumi. Among 29 Kirati languages, Dumi (iso 639-3 dus; Glottolog dumi1241) is endangered and is a minority Kirati language of the Rai group, which belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family with a total population 8,638 (female: 4,373 and male: 4,265) as reported in the national census 2021. It is spoken in their origin (i.e., the remote hill area) of the northern Khotang District in eastern Nepal.
Dumi is an agglutinating language, and therefore morphemes are attached to the verb stem tense, number and person. Tense, aspect and mood tend to appear as a complex category. Dumi is morphologically an ergative-absolutive language which has a rich case system and is characterized by some morphosyntactic features, inclusiveness vs. exclusiveness in first person non-singular personal pronouns, past and non-past tense system, such as pronominal possessive suffixes and indefinite suffixes that are attached to nouns, and some agreement features evidenced in verbs. Dumi encodes information such as subject and object in ditransitive verbs.
This volume consists of three sections. The first section presents basic information about the Dumi people and their language. In section two, there are highlighted the grammatical features found in Dumi. In section three, there is the collection of the interlinearized and analyzed texts. A total of 12 selected texts of true stories have been included in this volume hoping that this text collection will provide rich and varied data for illustrating several features in complex pronominalized Dumi.
ISBN 9783969392157. Languages of the World 67. 296pp. 2024.
