CHAPTER ONE THE ATONG LANGUAGE AND ITS SPEAKERS 1.1 Introduction In the most beautiful part of the jungle-clad South Garo Hills, around the Mountain of the Great Spirit and in the stream area of the scenic Symsang river live the Atong people, who speak a language with the same name. The literature provides us with different ways of spelling this name and there is no formal spelling for most of their villages, as we will see in section 1.3. Section 1.4 will reveal the ethnic affiliation of the Atongs, and relates about their way of life as I observed it during my fieldwork, complemented by citations and references from the relevant literature. Where they live and how many of them there are will be pointed out and commented upon in section 1.2. Atong speakers are not the only inhabitants of the South Garo Hills. The linguistic environment in which the language is spoken is one of the topics of section 1.5, where language status and use will also be discussed. Contrary to prior beliefs of the speakers themselves, the Atong language can be written, and even has an orthography especially designed for the language by the author of this grammar. Section 1.6 introduces and explains the orthography to the reader. There is not one way to speak Atong but several. The phenomenon of dialectal variation is treated in section 1.7. Section 1.8 on linguistic affiliation contains evidence for the idea that Atong is a Central Boro-Garo language, more closely related to Boro than to Rabha and Koch. However, before the reader will be presented with this evi- dence, (s)he will get an overview of different genetic classifications of Atong in the literature, from the earliest sources to the most recent ones. An overview of the research that has been done on Atong in the past is given in section 1.9. Finally, section 1.10 gives the bare facts about the fieldwork that was conducted to write this grammar. 1.2 Location of the Language and Number of Speakers Atong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the stream area of the Symsang [səmsaŋ] river in the south Garo Hills District of Meghalaya in Northeast India, and in adjacent areas in the West Khasi Hills and, according to my Atong friends, the Mymensingh district of Bangladesh. Map 1 shows the location of Meghalaya within India. Map 2 depicts the area where Atong is spoken within Meghalaya 2 chapter one and Map 3 is a close-up of the language area in which Nongalbibra (also called Nongal [nɔŋal]) demarcates the northern border of the language area and Baghmara the southern one. In Nongal and Jadi [dʑadi], Atong, Garo and Indic speakers live side by side. These places are market towns where different trades- people from all over North India have settled to set up shop. The main languages spoken in these places are Garo, Atong, Bengali, Punjabi and Nepali; there are also a few settlers from Rajasthan and Bihar. Code switching and mixing is com- monplace here. Atong people from the villages along the main road up to Badri frequently come to Jadi and Nongal to shop and work. Between Jadi, Raiwak, Rongsu and Waimong Mountain lies the heart of the Atong speaking area. Between Raiwak and Baghmara lie many villages where Garo is spoken and a few where Atong is spoken alongside Garo. As one approaches Baghmara the number of Atong speakers dwindles considerably. In Baghmara there are many Atong speakers, but they seldom or never speak their language outside their homes. Many people in Baghmara were Atong speakers in their childhood but have now switched to Garo completely. There are a few Atong villages in the West Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya which are not on the map due to lack of information about their exact loca- tion. According to some of my consultants, there are many Atong people liv- ing on the Bangladeshi side of the border, south and southeast of Baghmara. Some say that these Atongs still speak Atong, while others claim that they are now speaking Bengali or Garo. I was not able to travel to Bangladesh and verify the existence of an Atong language community there. Exploring the Bangladeshi side of the Meghalaya-Bangladesh border will be a matter for future fieldwork investigations. Many Atongs have migrated to Tura, the capital of the Garo Hills (see Map 2), in search of work or for their education. There are at least several hundred Atong speakers in the city, many of which are still in regular contact with family mem- bers in the Atong speaking area in the South Garo Hills. Atong people in Tura do not speak their language much in public, but use Garo instead. Atong is spo- ken in the home, amongst family or friends, when there are no Garo speakers present. There are also many people, sometimes whole families, of Atong back- ground who have completely given up their language and now speak only Garo. This language shift takes place under pressure of Garo as prestige language in the region. In none of the villages I visited was Atong the only language spoken. There is no official account of the number of Atong speakers. Grierson (1902: 85) mentions some fifteen thousand Atong speakers, while Van Driem (2001: 541) speaks about “a few thousand”. Even after more than twelve months of fieldwork in the area, it was impossible to estimate the number of speakers. New Atong- speaking villages are reportedly still being built, while at the same time Garo, a closely related and regionally important language, encroaches rapidly on a lot of existing Atong-speaking villages..