Introduction

chapter 1 Introduction

1 Introduction

Darma is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by fewer than 2,615 people in the Pithoragarh District of India’s northern state Uttarakhand (formerly part of Uttar Pradesh). The district is in the easternmost part of Kumaun, which to- gether with Garhwal to the west forms a region known historically, and now officially, as Uttarakhand. The highlighted area of Map 1 below indicates the area where Darma is spoken; the star indicates the location of Dharchula Town, which is the capital of Dharchula Tehsil, a sub-District of Pithoragarh.

map 1 Map of Pithoragarh District in Uttarakhand, India

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004409491_002 2 chapter 1

Identified with the ISO 639-3 code drd, scholars have referred to the lan- guage as Darmiya or Darma. The former moniker is rarely used by speakers themselves; it is assumed to be a label given to them by Hindi speakers and is found in historic literature and online – see for example, Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1909) and the Ethnologue (Simons & Fennig, 2017). Names as- sociated with the Darma people include Darmani, Shauka, and Bhotia;1 these will be discussed again in §2.1 of this chapter. This grammar is based on research that began in 2001 as part of my doctoral dissertation project (Willis, 2007a). The data presented in this work are largely extracted from naturally-occurring discourse, which was transcribed and translated with the assistance of native speakers. My analysis also draws on evidence gathered through observation and direct elicitation. The latter meth- od of data collection served as a useful forum for learning more about paradig- matic and other structural information related to the language. The remainder of this chapter will provide information to contextualize the Darma people and their language (§2 and §3), and provide background about this project (§4), discuss current classifications of Darma within Tibeto-Burman (§5), provide a literature review of existing Darma scholarship (§6), and a brief typological overview of the language (§7). I will also discuss methods of data collection and analysis, including the theoretical orientation of this work (§8 and §9). Finally, I will offer an overview of how the grammar is organized (§10).

2 Darma and the Rung People

Darma is the autonym that refers to both the language and the group of people who speak it. Because the name is used for the ancestral valley of the Darma, it may be best to consider it a loconym (Matisoff, 1986, p. 7), a term used when a place name is also used to refer to the language of a people.2 As we find throughout the Himalaya, the valleys of Uttarakhand are associated with groups of people who speak distinct languages. For example, the Darma live in one valley and speak their own language, while the Byangkho (Byans) and the Bangba (Chaudangs), each of whom speaks a different language, live in the valley to the east (see §2.2 of this chapter for further discussion of these

1 Also spelled Bhotiya. I will use Bhotia throughout, even if I am referencing scholars who use Bhotiya. 2 Matisoff has long been a wizard of nonce terms in Tibeto-Burman linguistics. He informs us that he chose this term – which is a mix of Latin and Greek – because the Greek word top- onym already existed. Matisoff astutely notes the alternative “topoglossonym is too long and chthononym is too ugly” (Matisoff, 1986, p. 7, fn 11).