Tamangic

Family Overview

The Tamangic languages are a sub-group of the Tibeto-Burman family spoken in the Himalayas of Nepal. The group includes languages with large populations, such as Tamang (with over a million speakers of its varieties) and smaller languages with only a few hundred speakers. The Tamangic varieties spoken in the Manang District of Nepal have relatively small speaker populations. Manang Gurung has less than 1000 speakers speakers (while the number of Gurung speakers as a whole is estimated to be around 325,000). Manange has around 1000 speakers and Nar-Phu (comprising the varieties Nar and Phu) has fewer than 600 speakers.

Syntactically, the Tamangic languages of Manang district are characterised by low referential density, such that argument omission is extremely common in discourse. There is an ergative-absolutive system of case in each of the languages, yet this is often differentially marked based on information structure conditions, leading to absence of case on most A arguments.

 




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