Gorum, orParengi, is a nearly extinct minorMunda language of India.

The nameGorum most likely comes from an animal/people prefixgo- and root -rum meaning 'people', and is possibly related to the ethnonymRemo (Anderson 2008:381).

Parengi, orParenga, is of obscure origin.

Gorum is 60 percent endangered and may soon become extinct. Few people under the age of thirty years can understand the language, while those who do know it are likely to deny knowing it.^[3] This language seems to have been first researched in 1933.^[4]

Gorum is a member of theMunda family, as shown by theglottal consonants that are used increaky voice. However, it has borrowed some elements from nearbyDravidian languages, such as doubly inflectedAVC structures.^[5]

Gorum speakers are located in the following areas of eastern India (Anderson 2008:381).

• Koraput district,Odisha: the former Nandapur and Pottangi taluks
• Visakhapatnam district,Andhra Pradesh: Munchingput block

Gutob is spoken to the north of Gorum, andGta to the west of Gorum.

In Gorum, palatal stops are completely replaced by fricatives /s/ and /z/. Stop aspiration and dental-retroflex distinction are also absent.

Creaky voice in Gorum is part of the morphology, i.e. grammaticalized, to demonstrate the affectedness of the verb stems. Although it has been suggested that creaky voice is reconstructible inproto-Austroasiatic, Anderson (2007) raises possibilities of whether Gorum creaky voice is true archaicism or pseudo-archaism.

Aze (1971) described that stress in generally found in word-final position in Gorum words produced in isolated utterances, while in nominal forms, stress falls in the penultimate syllable. In the case of verbal forms, the pattern may not be determined due to morpholexical complications.^[6]

Gorum distinguishes two numbers on nominals: unmarked singular and plural-gi.^[7]

Noun phrases are marked for possession. These possessive markers occur primarily with inalienable nouns, i.e. body parts, kin terms, and some lexical terms that are socioculturally determined to be inalienable like irrigated rice fields.^[8]

Gorum has two types of nominal marking to demonstrate clausal relation: objective/oblique/recipient markere- and locative postpositionetur. The conditions of variation in both cases and whether they carry any productive meaning or not remains unclear.^[9]

Gorum, like any other Munda languages, does not have a morphological concept of gender. Word pairs that show gender distinction are usually borrowed from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. However, there is, at least, some kinds of word class distinction based on animacy exist, but the evidence is faint or frozen in Gorum.^[10]

In Gorum, there are severalword derivation methods: affixation,reduplication, andcompounding, etc. Monosyllabic stems can takeprefixes such aspi-,bu-/bo-/ɔ-,u-,a-k/gV-,su-/sV-, infixes-n-,-ʔ-, suffixes-om,-li, partial or full reduplicate, and pair with verbs or nouns to form new words.^[11] There are verb-noun compounds, i.e.noun incorporation. Eg.zɔɖaʔ ('to (white) wash the walls'), composed ofzɔd ('to wipe off') andɖaʔ ('water'). Noun incorporation in Gorum is akin to the feature that also exists inSora,Juray,Remo,Gutob,Kharia,Gtaʔ, andKherwarian languages. Similar classificatory incorporation is found inNicobarese andKhasic as well and may be an archaic feature of Austroasiatic morphosyntax.

Two third plural subject markers-ey and=gi may co-occur on the same predicate at the same time in some contexts without any clear motives.^[12]

Possessor of a logical argument in Sora-Gorum is marked by the object type.

Version ("affectedness") is a highly marked feature in Gorum verbal morphology and is distinctive from voice markers is that it does not occupy a slot in Gorum verb structure and nor an indication of relations between verbal actants marked in the verbal complex, but to encode their status of being affected in the discourse space. As mentioned above, Gorum version is represented by creaky voice vowels. It is used optionally to denote the notions of primary affectedness, discourse salience, and discourse deictic orientation.^[13]

1. (subject affecting)

2. (passive agent/indirect experiencer subject [object-as-subject])

Gorum follows regional South Asianword order ofSOV, but the positions of demonstratives, possessives, numerals in the NPs and verbal indexation show support for the evidence that a different word order was historically used predominantly in earlier Gorum syntax.^[14]

Gorum folklore:The Shrew that became a Tiger

• Anderson, Gregory D. S.; Rau, Felix (2008). "Gorum".The Munda Languages. New York: Routledge. pp. 381–433.ISBN 0-415-32890-X.

• Endangered Language Project Database
• World Language Movies
• Opino Gomango on Sora language
• Bibliography on the Gorum language
• Gorum Dictionary

• Munda languages
• Endangered languages of India

• Language articles citing Ethnologue 19
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles containing Parenga-language text
• ISO language articles citing sources other than Ethnologue
• Articles with ambiguous glossing abbreviations