Nagamese Creole

Nagamese
Naga Pidgin
Native to Northeast India
Ethnicity Naga people
Native speakers
 (30,000 cited 1989)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 nag
Glottolog naga1394[2]

Nagamese ("Naga Pidgin") is a creole used in Nagaland. It has its origin from the interaction of the hill Naga people with the Indigenous Assamese people in the plains and developed primarily as a market language to communicate for trade. Since Nagaland is inhabited by people belonging to different Naga communities speaking languages which are mutually unintelligible, it has now come to serve as the more common lingua franca of the state, though English is the official language of the state. Nagamese is the preferred form of communication for extension works in rural areas and in mixed households. It has been described as a creole, which was stable by 1936 and which is unlikely to decreolize. English is the official language of Nagaland and 76.11% of the population is literate.

Nagamese has two cases, two tenses, three aspectual distinctions and no gender. It shares a large part of its lexicon with Assamese.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Nagamese at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Naga Pidgin". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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