Imphal Valley · Northeast Hill Massif

Dialect and oral traditions

Meiteilon, usually called Manipuri outside the valley, is a Tibeto-Burman language with an Indo-Aryan lexical overlay acquired through Vaishnavism, and it is the only Tibeto-Burman language in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution other than Bodo. It is tonal, has no grammatical gender, and marks relationships between clauses with a rich set of suffixes rather than with word order. Its script history is the region's most striking language fact: an indigenous script, Meitei Mayek, was in use for centuries, gave way to a Bengali-derived script from around the eighteenth century, and was then deliberately revived from the second half of the twentieth — taught in schools since the 2000s, so that a generation now reads its own language in a script its grandparents could not.

Speech varieties

Meiteilon (Manipuri)Tibeto-Burman, Kuki-Chin–Naga branch

The valley language and the lingua franca of the wider region, used across the hills as a second language. Tonal, with two contrasting tones doing lexical work.

Speakers: Around 18 lakh

Imphal standardTibeto-Burman

The register of the town, of broadcasting and of print. Locality speech across the valley differs mainly in vocabulary and in tone realisation rather than in grammar.

Bishnupriya ManipuriIndo-Aryan

A distinct Indo-Aryan language, not a dialect of Meiteilon, spoken by communities associated with the valley and now largely resident in Assam, Tripura and Bangladesh. The two languages share a cultural world and belong to different families entirely.

BrajabuliIndo-Aryan, literary

Not a spoken language but the artificial Vaishnav literary idiom used in Sankirtana and Raas song texts, carried in from Bengal and Assam and preserved here in performance long after it stopped being written elsewhere.

Indigenous terminology

Term	Meaning
Ngari	Fermented fish, made by sealing sun-dried fish in an oiled earthen pot for months. The valley's defining ingredient and the yardstick by which a cook is judged.
Phumdi	Floating mats of vegetation, soil and decomposing matter on Loktak, held together by root networks. Thick ones bear the weight of huts, livestock and deer; thin ones drift.
Athaphum	A ring of phumdi cut and towed into a circle by fishers to enclose fish. Seen from the air the southern lake is patterned with them.
Sangai	Rucervus eldii eldii, the brow-antlered deer of Keibul Lamjao, whose bobbing gait on the unstable phumdi gave it the name "dancing deer".
Leikai	A locality — the basic social unit of the valley, with its own club, its own pond, its own Umang Lai grove and its own Thabal Chongba ground. Almost everything organised here is organised by leikai.
Umang Lai	A sacred forest grove and the deity of it, each attached to a locality or a lineage. The Lai Haraoba of a grove is a locality's own festival, not a valley-wide one.
Sanamahi Kachin	The south-west corner of a Meitei house, where Lainingthou Sanamahi is placed. The orientation of the house is a ritual fact before it is an architectural one.
Maibi and maiba	The woman and man ritual specialists of Meitei practice — healers, mediums and the officiants of Lai Haraoba. The maibi's gestural repertoire is the source of much of the classical dance vocabulary.
Puya	A manuscript in Meitei Mayek. The corpus includes cosmogony, genealogy, ritual and the Cheitharol Kumbaba, a court chronicle kept year by year over several centuries.
Keithel	A market. Ima Keithel, the mothers' market, is the central one, and the word ima — mother — is the title given to its traders.
Sagol Kangjei	The stick-and-ball game played on ponies, seven a side, from which polo is locally and widely held to derive.
Chak-hao	Black rice — literally the delicious rice. Its colour is anthocyanin in the retained bran, and it is cooked for ceremony rather than for ordinary meals.
Yu	Distilled rice liquor, made in the fringe villages, of which Sekmai's is the best known. Distinct from the undistilled rice beers of the surrounding hills.

Sayings

Saying	Literally	Meaning
Ima	Mother	The address used for every trader in Ima Keithel and, more widely, the standard respectful term for an older woman. The market's name is simply this word applied to a place.
Sanamahi Kachin	The Sanamahi corner	Said of the south-west corner of a house, which is kept for the household deity. To say a house has no Sanamahi corner is to say it is not properly a house.
Chak chaba	To eat rice	The ordinary phrase for having a meal, in a valley where a meal without rice is not counted as one. The same construction as in the neighbouring languages, and a fair description of the diet.

Speech varieties, indigenous terminology and sayings of Imphal Valley. (16)