Also Known As Jaintia Or Synteng, Though Pnar Is the Term Pre

chapter 20 Pnar

Hiram Ring

1 Background

Pnar (pbv) (also known as Jaintia or Synteng, though Pnar is the term pre- ferred by speakers) is a member of the Khasian (or Meghalayan) branch of Austroasiatic language spoken in northeast India, primarily in the West and East Jaintia Hills Districts of Meghalaya State.1 Some speakers are found in Assam state to the north and east as well as in the neighboring country of Bangladesh to the south. Although traditionally described as a dialect of Khasi, Pnar exhibits key differences in pronunciation, lexicon, and syntax. According to native speakers of both languages, the differences mean that Pnar and Khasi are not mutually intelligible, though the similarities allow speakers of one language to learn the other in some months if they are made aware of the differences. The two communities also share many cultural similarities which have contributed to a unity of society and practice, particularly in the domains of government and traditional religion. Khasi is the main language of instruction in primary schools of the region. The 2001 Census of India counted 243,000 speakers of Pnar. The 2011 Census of India (which has not yet released language-specific figures) lists the total population of Jaintia Hills as 395,124. Daladier (2011) estimates the current number of Pnar speakers at around 700,000, though this seems largely a guess. As late as 2011, Khasi was listed in UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger2 as vulnerable, suggesting that it may be in some danger, but due to its consistent use as a language of instruction, this classification is somewhat problematic. There are twelve Pnar dialects listed by Daladier (2010) within the West and East Jaintia Hills Districts (Nartiang, Nonjngi, Nongbah, Mynso, Shilliang Myntang, Shangpung, Ralliang, Jowai, Rymbai, Sutnga, Nongkhlieh, Lakadong, Narpuh, and Saipung) and the prestige dialect is Jowai. A written system for Pnar, based on the Khasi alphabet, is also in some use within the Jaintia Hills, but very little has been written in Pnar and thus there is a lack of standardization.

1 The Jaintia Hills District was split into two districts, West and East, in 2012. 2 http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/.

According to the Buranji chronicles of the Ahom (Tai) kingdom in Assam as well as Pnar oral tradition, the Jaintia kingdom existed from before the 1500s AD and included not only the current Jaintia Hills district but also parts of the Khasi Hills, the Cachar Hills and the northern plains of Bangladesh, with its capital at Jaintiapur in the plains area. The British East India Trading Company annexed this kingdom in 1835, after creating an administrative centre for the area a few years earlier, in the Khasi town of Cherrapunji/Sohra (Gait, 1963 [1906]). The British deposed the Jaintia king while maintaining the traditional representative system of locally elected officials to govern the Pnar people in a form of indirect rule. Subsequently the British moved their administrative centre of the region from Cherrapunji near Bangladesh to Shillong, further north, at which time the Shillong/Sohra variety of Khasi became the domi- nant non-English language of communication and commerce for the hills of Meghalaya. There is some previous research available on the Pnar language. A fifty- nine page sketch by S.J. Grignard (1992 [1922]) based on the Mawkyndeng/ Raliang dialect of Pnar from 1922 was only recently published by the Catholic Church in 1992, and is not especially accurate. A 2007 PhD thesis of 268 pages by C. Bareh (NorthEastern Hill University (NEHU) Shillong), himself a Pnar speaker of the Rymbai variety, remains unpublished. Other recent sources of sketchy information on Pnar phonemes, dialects and elements of grammar are Daladier (2010, 2011); Sutradhar (2005, 2006); Choudhary (2004); Koshy (2009) and Temsen (2011). The present author is currently working on a comprehen- sive grammatical description of the Jowai dialect of Pnar. Morphologically, Pnar is a moderately isolating language with a low degree of fusion, similar to other Khasian languages. It exhibits a small number of portmanteau morphemes and a smattering of affixation. Word order (§4) is the main means of marking grammatical relations on core arguments (S, A, P),3 with oblique arguments case-marked. The usual assumption in the literature has been that Pnar follows the same pattern as Standard Khasi (SK: Choudhary, 2004; Bareh, 2007), which is described as AVP/SV (Rabel, 1961; Nagaraja, 1985) in which the predicate follows the A-argument and the P-argument follows the predicate. My analysis of Pnar, however, suggests a VAP/VS basic word order,

3 The choice of A to represent the argument “most likely to contribute to the success” of a two-place predicate (transitive verb) and of S to represent the single argument of a single- place predicate (intransitive verb) follows Dixon (2010). P (or O) represents the secondary argument of a two-place predicate.