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Magar Kham (मगर खाम), also known as Kham, Kham Magar, and Khamkura, is the Sino-Tibetan language variety of the Northern Magar people of Nepal.[3][4][5] The language is situated in the upper elevations of Baglung, East Rukum, and Rolpa districts. Based on census data taken in 2011, the total population of Magar Kham is estimated to be about 69,000 speakers.[1]
Magar Kham is a Sino-Tibetan language, and it is classified by David Bradley as “Central Himalayan,” and as being related to Magar and Chepang and more distantly related to the Kiranti languages. George van Driem also classifies Magar Kham as “Para-Kiranti,” emphasizing that Magar Kham, Magar, and Chepang are united more by their differences from the Kiranti cluster than by their similarity to one another.[6][7] Within this cluster, Magar Kham possesses a number of unique grammatical features, and shares only 44% lexical similarity with Magar and 38% with Chepang.[8]
Magar Kham speakers generally refer to their dialect using the name of an important village or river in conjunction with the Nepaliinstrumental suffix [-le] or the genitive suffix [-i]. Thus, it can be said that Magar Kham has as many dialects as there are villages and rivers in their native territory. The table below presents the major dialects of the Magar Kham language as they have been classified by David E. Watters.[8] The ISO 639-3 codes associated with each major dialect are presented in brackets.
At the highest level in the table, Kham has been divided into Gamal Kham, Sheshi Kham, and Parbate Kham, which is further divided into Eastern and Western Parbate Kham. As previously stated, these four major dialects are mutually unintelligible and bear unique grammatical innovations indicative of different languages.[13] For this reason, each of these dialects have been given its own ISO 639-3 designation.
Based on the census data taken in 2011, the total population of Magar Kham speakers is estimated to be about 69,000 persons.[1] The tables below presents the homeland population estimates by district and by dialect. It is estimated that about 15,000 Magar Kham speakers live in diaspora.[citation needed]
Estimates are based on the number of persons registering their mother tongue as either “Magar” or “Kham” within the territory of the northern Magars.[citation needed]
Although their homeland is fairly homogeneous, northern Magars are multilingual.[14][15] The national language of Nepali is spoken confidently by all individuals under 35 years old. In some communities (Sheshi and Eastern Parbate), parents have shifted to speaking Nepali with their children, and the speaker population is gradually decreasing. However, in all of East Rukum and in the Gam river valley of Rolpa, the language is being vigorously transmitted. Ethnologue has assigned the following EGIDS levels to each variety:
Western Parbate Kham [kjl]: level 5 (Developing)[11]
Kham nouns are marked for three numbers: singular (unmarked), dual (-ni) and plural (-rə). The plural marker has an allomorph -ra that appears when it is followed by another suffix.
Tripartite marking: The split ergativity patterns in Kham is overlapped for most of the argument's person/number and thus when both the agent and object arguments are both in the higher ranks of the argument hierarchy, the transitive subject/agent must be marked with ergative, while the object takes the oblique in order to distinguish it from the S/A arguments. There is no semantic and discourse-orientated variations in Kham alignment marking.
Kin terms are marked by inalienable possessive unless they are used as vocatives or referential proper nouns. Eg. ŋa-bəhrca ('my nephew') vs. phubu ('Aunt').
In Kham, a small number of lexical items are marked for gender, but not affecting elsewhere in the morphosyntax: -pa masculine, -ma feminine, and -za diminutive. Indo-Aryan gender distinction -a/-i is also borrowed, creating a semi-productive 'similative' class of nouns, i.e. lexical object is conceptualized as representative of an attribute.
Verbs in Kham inflect for various tense, aspect, mood, and mode categories, voices, negation, person/number of the subject, agent, and of the object in active voice. Kham person indexation have different paradigms for intransitive and transitive verbs as well for indicatives, optatives, and imperatives.[19]
^Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2022). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (25th ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
^Hitchcock, John T. (1966). The Magars of Banyan Hill. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
^Fischer, James F. (1986). Trans-Himalayan traders: Economy, society, and culture in northwest Nepal. Berkeley, CA: University of California.
^Oppitz, Michael. (1991). Onkels tochter, keine sonst. Uncle’s Daughter, Nobody Else. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
^Bradley, David. (1997). “Tibeto-Burman languages and classification.” In Papers in Southeast Asian Linguistics No. 14: Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, edited. by David Bradley, 1-72, Canberra: Australian National University.
^van Driem, George. (2001). Languages of the Himalayas: An ethnographic handbook of the greater Himalayan region, vol. 2. Leiden: Brill.
^ abcdefgWatters, David E.. (2002). A grammar of Kham. Cambridge: Cambridge University. ISBN0-521-81245-3
^Watters, David E.. (1998). The Kham language of west-central Nepal (Takale dialect). Ph.D. dissertation. Eugene, Oregon.
^Leman, Joseph D. (2019). “Sociolinguistic Profile of Maikoti Kham: A sociolinguistic study of the Kham language spoken in the area of Maikot village in East Rukum District of Nepal.” Journal of Language Survey Reports. SIL International.
^Watters, Stephen. (2018). Linguistic identity and dialect diversity: A conundrum with regard to Magar Kham. Language and identity in multilingual, migrating world. SIL International.
Dictionary: (Takale dialect) Watters, David E. 2004. A dictionary of Kham: Taka dialect (A Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal). Kirtipur: Tribhuvan University.
