Tripura Hills & Plains · Northeast Hill Massif
Kokborok is a Bodo-Garo language — closer to Bodo and Dimasa in Assam and to Garo in Meghalaya than to the Kuki-Chin languages of the hills immediately east, which is one of the region's more counter-intuitive facts. Its name is its own description: kok, language, and borok, people. It has been an official language of the state since 1979, is taught to degree level, and is written in both Bengali and Roman script. Beside it, in the same small territory, sit Bengali as the majority language, Chakma from the Indo-Aryan family with its own Brahmic script, Mog from the Arakanese branch of Burmese, Halam and Darlong from Kuki-Chin, and Mizo on the Jampui ridge. Few Indian regions of this size carry languages from this many branches.
Speech varieties
The Debbarma variety functions as the standard, with Reang, Noatia, Jamatia, Koloi and Rupini as the principal other dialects — mutually intelligible in most pairings, and differing most in vocabulary for farming and kinship.
Speakers: Around 13 lakh speakers recorded in and around this region at the 2011 Census
The dialect of the region's second-largest indigenous community, and the language of the Hojagiri song repertoire.
Continuous with the speech of the Meghna floodplain rather than with Kolkata Bengali, carrying eastern vocabulary and a distinct intonation, and the language of the region's print and administrative culture since the Manikya period.
Related to the Bengali of the Chittagong region but written in its own Brahmic script, and carried by a Buddhist community whose calendar runs on Bizu rather than on either of the region's other new years.
An Arakanese variety, written historically in Burmese script, belonging to a community that arrived from across the Bay rather than along the ranges.
Spoken by communities settled across the central and northern hills, and linguistically part of the continuum that runs east through Mizoram to the Chin Hills.
The language of the ridge-top villages at the northern end of the region, and of their Cheraw and hymn tradition.
Indigenous terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Twipra | The older name of the territory, generally read from twi, water, and pra, near — a name given by hill people to a country whose defining feature is the water at its edge. |
| Borok | People. It supplies the second half of Kokborok and of mui borok, and it is the word a Kokborok speaker uses for their own community rather than any administrative label. |
| Mui borok | The Kokborok-speaking communities' own cuisine, taken as a system — oil-free, berma-based, bamboo-cooked. The phrase is now also a restaurant category in Agartala. |
| Berma | Fermented sun-dried fish, pressed into cakes. The single ingredient by which the hill kitchen identifies itself. |
| Muya | Bamboo shoot — fresh in the monsoon, fermented for the rest of the year. |
| Wahan | Pork. Paired with an ingredient name, it produces most of the meat dish names in the language. |
| Mosdeng | A pounded raw chutney or salad, made in a mortar and served alongside. Serma is the tomato version. |
| Bwtwi | A slow-boiled stew named for whatever has gone into it. |
| Chuak and chuwarak | Rice beer, and the spirit distilled from it — the latter also made from pineapple or jackfruit. |
| Ochai | The traditional priest of the Kokborok-speaking communities, who conducts Garia and the household rites of the agricultural year. |
| Chantai | The hereditary priests of the fourteen dynastic deities, who carry the images to the Haora river for bathing at Kharchi. |
| Hoda | The Jamatia community's own council, a standing organisation with recognised authority in customary matters within the community. |
| Risa Sormani | The ceremony at which an adolescent girl is given her first risa — a life-stage marked by a cloth rather than by a rite of worship. |
| Rajmala | The dynastic chronicle of the Manikya line, composed in Bengali verse from the fifteenth century onward and extended by successive reigns — a hill dynasty writing its own record in the language of the plain. |
Sayings
| Saying | Literally | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Khulumkha | A salutation | The Kokborok greeting, used to a person and to a gathering. It is the first word a visitor to the hill areas learns and the one that most reliably changes the temperature of a conversation. |
| Mache bhate Bangali | Fish and rice make a Bengali | The plains self-description, current here as everywhere in the delta — and, in this region, a statement about the pond behind the house rather than about a river. |
| Baro mase tero parbon | Thirteen festivals in twelve months | A Bengali proverb about the density of the ritual calendar. In this region it undersells the position, because two calendars are running at once and mid-April has four new years in it. |
Speech varieties, indigenous terminology and sayings of Tripura Hills & Plains. (17)