thumb|A description of the king and queen of the termites in Sylheti
Sylheti is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by an estimated 11 million people, primarily in Sylhet Division of Bangladesh, Barak Valley of Assam, and northern parts of Tripura in India. In addition, there are substantial numbers of Sylheti speakers in the Indian states of Meghalaya, Manipur, and Nagaland, for many native speakers Sylheti forms the diglossic vernacular, with standard Bengali forming the codified lect. Some incorrectly consider it as a "corrupt" form of Bengali,
Name
Sylheti is eponymously named after Sylhet, referring to the dialect or language spoken of that area. According to the vernacular was called Sylhettia by the Europeans after the town of Sylhet. Though the speakers at that time referred to it as Jaintiapuri, Purba Srihattiya, or Ujania with the latter meaning "the language of the upper country".
Sylheti is also spelt or known as Sylhetti (or Sileti), Sylheti Bangla and Siloti (also spelt in Syloti or Syloty).
History
Sylheti belongs to the Eastern Indo-Aryan languages that evolved from Magadhi Prakrit. The lowlands around Sylhet were originally inhabited by ancient Khasi people (Austroasiatic); and the earliest known Indo-Aryan settlements were made in the 6th century under Kamarupa king. The Sylheti language was known as the language of the ancient Surma Valley and the Barak Valley in the sixth century CE, so it is assumed that this language is nearly 15 centuries old.
Sylhet (Srihatta) then emerged as a center of lowland territorialism after the 10th century. The 11th century Bhatera grants from the Srihatta kings Kesavadeva and Isanadeva were written in Sanskrit. Another notable copper plate inscription was found in the village of Paschimbhag in Rajnagar, Moulvibazar that was issued by King Srichandra during the 10th century.
The Muslim Conquest of Sylhet in 1303 CE extended the migratory movements of Muslims from western lands, who settled among the native population and greatly influenced the local language. Thus Sylheti derived a large number of words from Persian and Arabic, indicating the Perso-Arabic influence on the vernacular. A script was developed in the region called Sylheti Nagri, which primarily focused on disseminating Sufi poetry, known as puthi. Its earliest known work had been written during the 1600s, called Bhedsar by Syed Shah Husayn Alam. The literature was transcribed in the standard form of late Middle Bengali, it was similar to the Dobhashi idiom though phonologically was strongly influenced by Sylheti. The script was read and taught culturally among households and was not institutionalised, Printed texts of the script reached its peak during the late 19th century, however its use became obsolete by around the middle of the 20th century.
In 1903, Grierson reported that Sylheti was spoken only around Sylhet town of the then Sylhet district (now Sylhet Division and Karimganj district in Assam), and that among the Indo-Aryan speakers in the district, about 33 per cent spoke this language.
The earliest appearance of a documentation of Sylheti vocabulary was in the Government Report on the History and Statistics of Sylhet District by T. Walton, B.C.S. in 1857, which contained a list of peculiar words used in Sylhet. Many terms that were listed here differ from modern Sylheti – highlighting its evolution. In 1868, another short glossary of local terms in various districts of the Dacca Division (which included Sylhet) were written up and compared to standard Bengali to allow ease in understanding local vernaculars. Despite being annexed to the Assam Province during colonial rule, Sylheti speakers felt a linguistic affinity with the rest of Bengal. Bengali literature had some influence from Sylheti, popular songwriters or poets such as Hason Raja or Shah Abdul Karim, significantly contributed to the literature. Sylhet was reunited with Bengal following a referendum in 1947.
Status
According to Simard, Dopierala and Thaut, Sylheti is a "minoritised, politically unrecognised, and understudied language." It is currently not officially recognised as a language in either Bangladesh or India. Many native speakers consider it to be a slang or corrupt version of Standard Bengali and not an independent language; and there is a reported language shift to Standard Bengali and a decrease in the number of native speakers since parents are not teaching it to their children. In Bangladesh, there is a diglossia where Sylheti is one among other low status regional dialects while Standard Bengali, the official language, has a high status.
In the Indian state of Assam where Assamese is the state language, Standard Bengali language serves as an additional official language in its Barak Valley districts, which host a majority Sylheti-speaking population.
In the United Kingdom, British schools have begun enlisting Sylheti in their syllabi. BBC News has also broadcast online videos relating to COVID-19 in five major South Asian languages including Sylheti.
Classification
notes that the language of eastern Sylhet is not intelligible to Bengalis from the west, though he still classed it as Bengali, grouping it under "Eastern Bengali". too calls it a dialect of Bengali and places it in the eastern Vangiya group of Magadhi Prakrit and notes that all Bengali dialects were independent of each other and did not emanate from the literary Bengali called "sadhu bhasha". Among the different eastern dialect groups, Sylheti and Chittagonian have phonetic and morphological properties that are alien to standard Bengali and other western dialects of Bengali, and these differences are such that Sylheti is more distant to standard Bengali than is Assamese.
Recent scholarship notes that these morpho-phonological and mutual intelligibility differences are significant enough that Sylheti could claim itself as a language on its own right. Ethnologue groups Sylheti in Bengali–Assamese languages;
Language-dialect controversy
While modern sociolinguistics generally talks about varieties, rather than languages and dialects, there are still many disagreements about the status of language varieties outside the discipline. These can be for reasons of funding or recognition, or for reasons of identity.
The classification of Sylheti is contentious—Chalmers (1996) suggested that it was generally identified as a dialect of Bengali though there were efforts to recognise it as a language. Grierson had classified Sylheti as an Eastern Bengali dialect and had noted that it "possess all the peculiar characteristics of the extreme Eastern Bengali type." On the basis of the anecdotal evidence of mutual intelligibility, regionality and the fact that Sylheti is spoken by a predominantly rural community, concludes that Sylheti could be considered a dialect of Bengali. Simard, Dopierala and Thaut have pointed out that the intelligibility could be an effect of prior exposure of Sylheti speakers to Standard Bengali, and that the academic consensus is that mutual intelligibility ranges from "unintelligible" to "hardly intelligible". On the basis of phonology and phonetics, lexicon, grammatical structure and a lack of mutual intelligibility, some recent linguists claim that Sylheti is not merely a dialectal variation of Bengali but a language in its own right.
Phonologically Sylheti is distinguished from Standard Bengali and other regional Bengali dialects by significant deaspiration and spirantisation, leading to major restructuring of the consonant inventory and the development of tones.
As majority of the diaspora in the United Kingdom speak Sylheti, it created an environment that was somewhat uninfluenced by Standard Bengali, inevitably leading some to view Sylheti as a distinct language. During the 1980s there were unsuccessful attempts to recognise Sylheti as a language in its own right by a small group in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which lacked support from the Sylheti community itself.
Literature
right|thumb|326x326px|Cover of 19th century Halat-un-Nabi by [[Sadeq Ali]]
Halat-un-Nabi, a puthi written by Sadeq Ali is considered to be the most prominent literature in Sylheti Nagri.
The presence and influence of Shah Jalal and Shri Chaitanya dev is found in the Sylheti literature. According to Syed Mostafa Kamal, (approximately 1650 AD) the Baul tradition was founded based on the combination of Chaitanyavad and Jaganmohani ideologies, that mystic literature influenced and seen in the Vaishnava Padavali. As a result, Sylhet is considered as the spiritual capital of mysticism and the fertile land of Baul music.
Writing system
Sylheti currently does not have a standardised writing system. It is claimed by some that the orthography of the script equates with Sylheti, due to the fewer characters compared with the Bengali script as there are fewer phonemes found in Sylheti. An endangered script, it has since seen a revival mostly by academics and linguists.
Because Standard Bengali is the medium of instruction of state schools in Bangladesh, some may write Sylheti using the Bengali–Assamese script. The New Testament in Sylheti was published in the Sylhet Nagri script along with versions in the Latin and in the Bengali–Assamese script, in 2014. STAR is developing a (three script) transliteration system , transliterating the language's name, for example as Siloṭi in Latin script. Recent findings assert that the local dialect spoken in much of the Habiganj district differs quite significantly from Sylheti. According to dialectal studies, the dialects spoken in Habiganj and Sunamganj districts are phonologically and grammatically more similar to Brahmanbaria and East Mymensingh than eastern parts of Sylhet division. Therefore, the dialect of western Sylhet (Habiganj-Sunamganj) is classified with the dialects of Greater Dhaka, Mymensingh, Comilla etc. regions by scholars as it is dialectally allied with these regions.
Sylheti is also widely spoken in the southern Assam region of Barak Valley, India, which includes the districts of Cachar, Hailakandi and Karimganj. In addition, it is spoken in the northern parts of Tripura and the state of Nagaland. It is estimated there are around 400,000 Sylheti speakers in the UK. The largest concentration live in east London boroughs, such as Tower Hamlets. There are also significant numbers of speakers in the United States, most are concentrated in New York City, and in Hamtramck, Michigan where majority of Bangladeshi Americans there are of Sylheti origin. There are also small numbers located in Toronto, Canada. Significant Sylheti-speaking communities reside in the Middle East of which most are migrant workers, and in many other countries throughout the world.
Lexicon
Sylheti shares most linguistic properties with Standard Bengali, with a lexical similarity of 53.2% to 70%.
Phonology
The phoneme inventory of Sylheti differs from both Standard Rarhi Bengali as well as the typical Bangladeshi Standard. It is characterised by a loss of breathiness and aspiration contrasts, leading to a significant reduction in its phoneme inventory and to the development of tones. In particular, the following developments are seen:
- Both voiced and voiceless aspirated stops have become unaspirated ( → ; → ).
- The voiceless labials have spirantised to homorganic fricatives ( → ; → ).
- The velar stops have become velar fricatives ( → ; → ), although can be heard as an allophone of when preceded by high vowels .
- The post-alveolar affricates have spirantised to alveolar fricatives ( → ; → ; → ; → ).
- Among the voiceless stops only the dental /, / and retroflex /, / stops have remained stops. In some analyses, the dental–retroflex distinction (/, /) is replaced by a dental–alveolar one (/, /).
! ||Front||Central||Back
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!Close
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!Mid
|~ || ||~
|-style="text-align:center"
!Open
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{| style="margin: 1em auto 1em auto 1em"
|- valign="top"
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{| class="wikitable"
|+Consonants This is rare among the Indo-Aryan languages, but not unheard of, e.g. in Punjabi, Dogri, Chittagonian, Gawri (Kalam Kohistani), Torwali, some Eastern Bengali varieties, etc. There are two types of tonal contrasts in Sylheti: the emergence of high tone in the vowels following the loss of aspiration, and a level tone elsewhere.
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
|-
! Word
! Transliteration
! Tone
! Meaning
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'intestine'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'hand'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'ink'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'empty'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'powder'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'horse'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'theft'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'knife'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'net, web'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'spicy/pungent'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'tick'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'correct'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'branch'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'shield'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'palmyra, rhythm'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'plate'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'donation'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'paddy'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'bridge'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'flower'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'bangle'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'good, welfare'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| level
| 'arthritis'
|-
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| high
| 'rice'
|}
A more recent study shows that there is a three-way tonal system in Sylheti words with two syllables or more. According to this analysis, words with aspiration in the final syllable historically gain a high tone across the word, whilst those with initial aspiration have this replaced by a low tone across the word. Those with no historical aspirated consonants retain a mid tone.
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
|-
! No.
! Word
! IPA
! Tone
! Meaning
! Word
! IPA
! Tone
! Meaning
! Word
! IPA
! Tone
! Meaning
|-
| 1
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| High
| 'goat'
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| Low
| 'torn'
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| Mid
| 'grindstone'
|-
| 2
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| High
| 'room'
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| Low
| 'taunting'
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| Mid
| 'stick'
|-
| 3
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| High
| 'fan'
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| Low
| 'empty'
| bgcolor="#CCCCCC" |
|
| Mid
| 'ripe'
|}
It is considered that these tones arose when aspirated consonants lost their aspiration. Sylheti continues to have a long history of coexisting with tonal Tibeto-Burman languages including various dialects of Kokborok such as Reang. Even though there is no clear evidence of direct borrowing of lexical items from those languages into Sylheti, there is still a possibility that the emergence of Sylheti tones is due to external influence, as the indigenous speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages by and large use Sylheti as a common medium for interaction.
Grammar
Sylheti grammar is the study of the morphology and syntax of Sylheti.
Nouns
Case
When a definite article such as -gu/ṭa (singular) or -guin/ṭin (plural) is added, equivalent to using the measure word for the noun as an infix, nouns are also inflected for number. However, in Sylheti, this marked nominative is only exhibited by nouns, and not by pronouns.