| Kusunda | |
|---|---|
| Gemehaq gipan[1] | |
| Pronunciation | [gemʰjaχgipən]ⓘ |
| Native to | Nepal |
| Region | Gandaki Province,Lumbini Province |
| Ethnicity | 253Kusunda (2021 census) |
Native speakers | 23 (2021) |
| Revival | Classes available |
| Devanagari | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | kgg |
| Glottolog | kusu1250 |
| ELP | Kusunda |
 Ethnologue locations: (west)Dang andPyuthan districts (dark grey) withinLumbini Province; (center)Tanahun District withinGandaki Province EndangeredLanguages.com location: red WALS location: purple (Gorkha District) | |
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Kusunda orKusanda (endonymGemehaq gipanKusunda:[gemʰjaχ]ⓘ[gipən]ⓘ[1]) is alanguage isolate spoken by a few among theKusunda people in western and centralNepal. As of 2023, it only has a single fluent speaker,Kamala Sen-Khatri,[2] although there are efforts underway to keep the language alive.[3] There are 23 native speakers according to the2021 Nepal census.[4]
For decades the Kusunda language was thought to be on the verge of extinction, with little hope of ever knowing it well. The little material that could be gleaned from the memories of former speakers suggested that the language was an isolate, but, without much evidence, it was often classified along with its neighbors asTibeto-Burman. However in 2004 three Kusundas, Gyani Maya Sen, Prem Bahadur Shahi and Kamala Singh,[5] were brought toKathmandu for help with citizenship papers. There, members ofTribhuvan University discovered that one of them, a native of Sakhi VDC in southernRolpa District, was a fluent speaker of the language. Several of her relatives were also discovered to be fluent. In 2005 there were known to be seven or eight fluent speakers of the language, the youngest in her thirties.[1] However the language ismoribund, with no children learning it, since all Kusunda speakers have married outside their ethnicity.[1]
It was presumed that the language became extinct with the death of Rajamama Kusunda on 19 April 2018.[6] However,Gyani Maiya Sen and her sisterKamala Sen-Khatri contributed in further data collection, language training and revival of the language.[7] The sisters, together with author and researcherUday Raj Aaley, have been teaching the language to interested children and adults.[8]
Aaley, the facilitator and Kusunda-language teacher, has written the bookKusunda Tribe and Dictionary.[9] The book has a compilation of more than 1000 words from the Kusunda language.
David E. Watters published a mid-sized grammatical description of the language, plus vocabulary (Watters 2005), although further works have been published since.[10] He argued that Kusunda is indeed a language isolate, not just genealogically but also lexically, grammatically and phonologically distinct from its neighbors. This would imply that Kusunda is a remnant of the languages spoken in northern India before the influx of Tibeto-Burman- andIndo-Iranian-speaking peoples; however it is not classified as aMunda nor aDravidian language. It thus joinsBurushaski,Nihali and (potentially) the substrate of theVedda language in the list of South Asian languages that do not fall into the main categories of Indo-European, Dravidian,Sino-Tibetan, andAustroasiatic.
Before the recent discovery of active Kusunda speakers there had been several attempts to link the language to an established language family. B.K. Rana (2002) maintained that Kusunda was aTibeto-Burman language as traditionally classified.Merritt Ruhlen argued for a relationship withJuwoi and otherAndamanese languages; and for a largerIndo-Pacific language family, with them and other languages, includingNihali.[11]
Others have linked Kusunda toMunda (seeWatters 2005);Yeniseian (Gurov 1989);Burushaski andCaucasian (Reinhard and Toba 1970; this would be a variant of Gurov's proposal ifSino-Caucasian were accepted); and theNihali isolate in central India (Fleming 1996, Whitehouse 1997). More recently a relationship between Kusunda, Yeniseian and Burushaski has been proposed.[12]
Phonetically, Kusunda has six vowels in twoharmonic groups, which are arguably three vowels phonemically: a word will normally have vowels from the upper (pink, italic) or lower (green) set, but not both simultaneously. There are very few words that consistently have either always upper or always lower vowels; most words may be pronounced either way, though those withuvular consonants require the lower set (as in many languages). There are a few words with no uvular consonants that still bar such dual pronunciations, though these generally only feature the distinction in careful enunciation.[1]
| Vowels | Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Mid | e | ə | o |
| Open | a |
Kusunda consonants seem to only contrast the active articulator, not where that articulator makes contact. For example, apical consonants may bedental,alveolar,retroflex, orpalatal:/t/ is dental[t̪] before/i/, alveolar[t͇] before/e,ə,u/, retroflex[ʈ] before/o,a/, and palatal[c] when there is a following uvular, as in[coq] ~[t͇ok] ('we').[1]
In addition, many consonants vary betweenstops andfricatives; for instance,/p/ seems to surface as[b] between vowels, while/b/ surfaces as[β] in the same environment.Aspiration appears to be recent to the language. Kusunda also lacks theretroflex consonant phonemes that are common to the region, and is unique in the region in havinguvular consonants.[1]
| Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | sibilant | |||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | ɴˤ | ||||
| Stop | voiceless | p~b | t~d | t͡s | k~ɡ | q~ɢ | ʔ | |
| voiced | b~β | d | d͡z | ɡ~ɣ | ||||
| aspirated | (pʰ) | (tʰ) | (t͡sʰ) | (kʰ~x) | (qʰ) | |||
| breathy | (bʱ) | (dʱ) | (d͡zʱ) | (ɡʱ) | ||||
| Fricative | s | ʁ~ʕ | h | |||||
| Approximant | w | l | j | |||||
| Flap | ɾ | |||||||
[ʕ] does not occur initially, and[ŋ] only occurs at the end of a syllable, unlike in neighboring languages.[ɴʕ] only occurs between vowels; it may be |ŋ+ʕ|.[1]
Kusunda has several cases, marked on nouns and pronouns, three of which are thenominative (Kusunda, unlike its neighbors, has noergativity),genitive, andaccusative.[1]
| Nominative | Genitive | Accusative | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st person, singular | tsi | tsi, tsi-yi | tən-da |
| 1st person, plural | tok | tig-i | (toʔ-da) |
| 2nd person, singular | nu | nu, ni-yi | nən-da |
| 2nd person, plural | nok | ?nig-i | (noʔ-da) |
| 3rd person | gina | (gina-yi) | gin-da |
Other case suffixes include-ma "together with",-lage "for",-əna "from",-ga, -gə "at, in".
There are alsodemonstrative pronounsna andta. Although it is not clear what the difference between them is, it may beanimacy.
Subjects may be marked on the verb, though when they are they may either be prefixed or suffixed. An example witham "eat", which is more regular than many verbs, in the present tense (-ən) is,
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| 1st person | t-əm-ən | t-əm-da-n |
| 2nd person | n-əm-ən | n-əm-da-n |
| 3rd person | g-əm-ən | g-əm-da-n |
Other verbs may have a prefixts- in the first person, or zero in the third.
| Proto-Kusunda | |
|---|---|
| Reconstruction of | Kusunda language |
Proto-Kusunda pre-root nominal prefixes can be categorized into a two=slot system, with the possessor prefix attached before the classificatory prefix, which in turn comes before the root noun (for example, *g-u-hu 'bone' and *g-i-dzi 'name').[13]
| possessor prefix (-2) | classificatory prefix (-1) | |
|---|---|---|
| 1st person | *t- | *i- (external body parts, abstractions) |
| 2nd person | *n- | *a- |
| 3rd person | *g- | *u- (internal body parts), *ja- (human beings) |
The proposed class markers *i-, *a-, *u-, and *ja- are proposed to be triggered by the possessive-marking prefixes *t-, *n-, and *g-. The system is reminiscent of nominal morphology in theGreat Andamanese languages.[13]
Below are some Proto-Kusunda lexical reconstructions from Spendley (2024),[13] based on data of different Kusunda dialects from Hodgson (1857) and Reinhard & Toba (1970).[14][15]
| gloss | Proto-Kusunda |
|---|---|
| arm | *i-muq; *a-wai |
| below | *a-ma |
| blood | *u-ju |
| bone | *g-u-hu |
| child | *ja-ti |
| ear | *i-au |
| eye | *i-niN |
| father | *ja-hi |
| foot, leg | *i-aN |
| friend | *ja-mti |
| hole | *au |
| knee | *u-putu |
| mother-in-law | *g-ja-ku[g/dz]i |
| mouth | *a/u-ta |
| name | *g-i-dzi |
| nose | *i-nau |
| skin | *i-tat |
| stomach | *a-mat |
| tongue | *u-dziŋ |
| tooth | *u-hu |
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