A.tong is one of the Garo dialect Sino-Tibetan (or Tibeto-Burman) language which is also related to Koch, Rabha, Bodo other than Garo language. It is spoken in the South Garo Hills and West Khasi Hills districts of Meghalaya state in Northeast India, southern Kamrup district in Assam, and adjacent areas in Bangladesh. The spelling "A.tong" is based on the way the speakers themselves pronounce the name of their language. There is no glottal stop in the name and it is not a tonal language.
A reference grammar of the language has been published by Seino van Breugel. A dictionary with Atong–English and English-A.tong sections, as well as semantic word lists was published in 2021, two years after the publication of an analysis of A.tong stories. In 2009, a book of stories in A.tong and an Atong-English dictionary were published by and sold at the Tura Book Room in Tura, Meghalaya, India. It is not certain if those books are still available there. The A.tong spelling system used in those books is explained in the A.tong Spelling Guide, available online.
Atong has been classified as an endangered language by Ethnologue. Atong's situation is most probably due to the influence of Standard Garo, a prestige language in the State of Meghalaya. Many parents are not teaching Atong to their children anymore. However, there are still places in South Garo Hills and West Khasi Hills where Atong is still spoken and also transmitted to the younger generation.
Sociolinguistics
There is no current estimate of the number of speakers available; according to the Linguistic Survey of India, it was spoken by approximately 15,000 people in the 1920s. Since the Atong are considered a subdivision of the Garos, they are not counted as a separate ethnic or linguistic community by the Indian government.
Almost all Atong speakers are bilingual in Garo to a greater or lesser extent, and Garo is seen as the more prestigious language. Garo is also the language of education in schools in the Atong-speaking area, although some schools provide education in English.
Mutual intelligibility with Garo
In India, the Atongs are considered to belong to the Garo Tribe, however, they speak a distinct language,
|-
|Nang' jama / chola bykphyl
|Your shirt is inside out
|-
|Na'a angna tangka hyn'chawama?
|Won't you give me any money?
|-
|Ningba ytykyi takwa ga'nima?
|Will it be good if we do it like this?
|}
Atong has many loanwords from Assamese language, Bengali, Hindi and English. These loanwords can all easily be spelled in Atong orthography using the Latin script (also called the Roman script). Example of loans from English are: redio (from the English word 'radio'), rens (from the English word 'wrench'), skul (from the English word 'school'), miting (from the English word 'meeting'). Other examples of loanwords are chola (from Assamese: /sʊla/ 'jacket, tunic, coat') and jama (from Assamese /jāmā/ 'coat, shirt, blouse jacket').
References
External links
- Atongmorot, educational YouTube Channel [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHfiZwqyWC7HfZUAQ1RH1ew]
- Atong basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
- Atong-English Dictionary
- Atongmorot Balgaba Golpho
- Atong Spelling Guide