page_title: Assamese language
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Assamese language / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Silver rupee of Sukhrungphaa (reign 1696-1714), or Rudra Simha
context_page_description: Assamese, also Asamiya, is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the Indian state of Assam, where it is an official language. It is the easternmost Indo-European language, spoken by over 14 million speakers, and serves as a lingua franca in the region.
  Nefamese is an Assamese-based pidgin used in Arunachal Pradesh and Nagamese, an Assamese-based Creole language is widely used in Nagaland. The Kamtapuri language of Rangpur division of Bangladesh and Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri districts of India are linguistically closer to Assamese, though the speakers identify with the Bengali culture and the literary language. In the past, it was the court language of the Ahom kingdom from the 17th century.
  Along with other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Assamese evolved at least before 7th century CE from the middle Indo-Aryan Magadhi Prakrit, which developed from dialects similar to, but in some ways more archaic than Vedic Sanskrit.
  Its sister languages include Angika, Bengali, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Chakma, Chittagonian, Hajong, Rajbangsi, Maithili, Rohingya and Sylheti. It is written in the Assamese alphabet, an abugida system, from left to right, with many typographic ligatures.
context_section_description: Assamese originated in Old Indo-Aryan dialects, though the exact nature of its origin and growth is not clear yet. It is generally believed that Assamese and the Kamatapuri lects derive from the Kamarupi dialect of Eastern Magadhi Prakrit that kept to the north of the Ganges; though some authors contest a close connection of Assamese with Magadhi Prakrit. Assamese developed from Indo-Aryan settlements of Kamarupa—in urban centers and along the Brahmaputra river surrounded by Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic communities. Kakati's (1941) assertion that Assamese has an Austroasiatic substrate is generally accepted — which suggests that when the Indo-Aryan centers formed in the 4th-5th centuries CE, there were substantial Austroasiatic speakers that later accepted the Indo-Aryan vernacular. The Indo-Aryan vernacular in Kamarupa had differentiated itself from the original vernacular by the 7th-century, before it did in Bengal or Orissa, as observed by Xuanzang the Chinese traveler. These changes were likely due to non-Indo-Aryan speakers adopting the language. The evidence of the newly differentiated vernacular is found in the Prakritisms present in the Sanskrit of the Kamarupa inscriptions from which eventually Assamese emerged.
  The earliest forms of Assamese in literature are found in the ninth-century Buddhist verses called Charyapada, and in 12-14th century works of Ramai Pundit (Sunya Puran), Boru Chandidas (Krishna Kirtan), Sukur Mamud (Gopichandrar Gan), Durllava Mullik (Gobindachandrar Git) and Bhavani Das (Mainamatir Gan). In these works, Assamese features coexist with features from other Modern Indian Languages.
  A fully distinguished literary form (poetry) appeared first in the 13th-century — in the courts of the Kamata kingdom, where Hema Sarasvati created the poem Prahrāda Carita. In the 14th-century, Madhava Kandali translated the Ramayana into Assamese (Saptakanda Ramayana) in the court of Mahamanikya, a Bodo-Kachari king from central Assam.  From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, songs – Borgeets, dramas – Ankia Naat by  Sankardev and Madhavdev and the first prose writings by Bhattadeva were composed. The literary language moved to the court of the Ahom kingdom in the seventeenth century, where it became the state language. This period saw the widespread development of standardised prose in Buranjis, infused with Arabic and Persian elements.
  According to Goswami (2003), this included "the colloquial prose of religious biographies, the archaic prose of magical charms, the conventional prose of utilitarian literature on medicine, astrology, arithmetic, dance and music, and above all the standardised prose of the Buranjis. The literary language, having become infused with the eastern idiom, became the standard literary form in the nineteenth century, when the British adopted it for state purposes. As the political and commercial center shifted to Guwahati after the mid-twentieth century, the literary form moved away from the eastern variety to take its current form.
caption: Silver coin issued during the reign of Rudra Singha with Assamese inscriptions.
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