Sumi_language
Sümi language
Sino-Tibetan language spoken in India
Sümi, also Sema, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nagaland, India. It is spoken by the Sümi Naga people. It differs from every other Naga languages due to the presence of guttural sounds.[2][3]
Sümi is spoken in central and southern Nagaland, mainly in Zünheboto District. There are also good number of speakers in parts of Niuland, Dimapur, Chümoukedima and Kiphire District(s), as well as in 7 villages of Tinsukia District, Assam (Ethnologue).
Ethnologue lists the following dialects of Sümi.
- Dayang (Western Sümi)
- Lazami
- Jimomi
- Zumomi
The transcriptions in this section use the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Vowels
The vowels of Sümi are as follows:[4][5]
Notes:
- The close front and the close central vowels have been variously described as near-close [i̞, ɨ̞] and close [i, ɨ]. The close back vowel has only been described as close [u].[6][7]
- The mid vowels /e, o/ can be realized as either close-mid [e, o] or open-mid [ɛ, ɔ].[4][9]
- Teo (2012) describes the close-mid allophone of /o/ as slightly advanced [o̟].[6]
- /a/ has been variously described as near-open [ɐ][6] and open [ä].[8]
Consonants
The consonants of Sümi are as follows:[5][10]
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | plain | m | n | ŋ | |||
| aspirated | mʱ | nʱ | |||||
| Plosive | voiceless | p | t | k | q | ||
| aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | kʰ | qʰ | |||
| voiced | b | d | ɡ | ||||
| Affricate | voiceless | tʃ ~ ts | |||||
| aspirated | tʃʰ ~ tsʰ | ||||||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | ʃ ~ s | x | h | ||
| voiced | v ~ w | ʒ ~ z | ɣ | ||||
| Approximant | ɹ | j | |||||
| Lateral | plain | l | |||||
| aspirated | lʱ | ||||||
- "Statement 1: Abstract of speakers' strength of languages and mother tongues - 2011". www.censusindia.gov.in. Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India. Retrieved 7 July 2018.
- Teo (2012), p. 369.
- Teo (2014), p. 20.
- Teo (2012), p. 368.
- Teo (2014), pp. 27–28.
- Teo (2014), p. 28.
- Teo (2014), p. 27.
- Teo (2012), p. 366.
- Sreedhar, Mangadan Veetil (1976), Sema phonetic reader, Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages
- Sreedhar, Mangadan Veetil (1980), A Sema Grammar, Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages
- Teo, Amos B. (2012), "Sumi (Sema)", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 42 (3): 365–373, doi:10.1017/S0025100312000254
- Teo, Amos B. (2014), A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland, Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics, ISBN 978-1-922185-10-5
- Sümi DoReCo corpus compiled by Amos Teo. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations.
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