Classifiers in Mising

Abstract

Mising is an under described language from the Eastern Tani branch of the Tani subgroup of Tibeto-Burman (Figure 1). It is currently spoken by approximately 587,310 Mising tribes people living primarily in eight districts of upper Assam, namely Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sibsagar, Jorhat, Golaghat, Dhemaji, Lakhimpur, and Sonitpur (Census of India 2001). There are at least nine regional varieties of Missing: Pagro, Dalu, Ojan, Saajay, Moojiy, Dambug, Samuguria, Tamargoja, and Bojkual, of which the last three groups have largely adopted Assamese (an Indo-Aryan language) in preference to Mising for the majority of language situations. Mising is a synthetic and agglutinating language with extensive verb morphology (suffixes), as is typical of the Tani languages. Unlike most other Tani languages, most if not all varieties of Mising appear to lack tone as a contrastive lexical feature.