LANGUAGES
All the major Naga tribes have their own language. In actual practice, the
language, even within one tribal area, varies from village to village. There
are about thirty languages. The multiplicity of Naga languages is mainly because
of the living condition in the past, when villages were isolated and there was
little of friendly inter-communication between them.
Naga languages in the Tibeto-Burman family is divided
into three groups; the western sub-group, the central sub-group
and the eastern sub-group. The western sub-group comprises Angami, Sema, Rengma
and Chakhesang languages; the central sub-group include Ao, Lotha and
Phom languages; while the eastern sub-groups is made up of among
others, Chang and Konyak languages.
It is interesting to find that some Naga tribes have borrowed
Sanskrit words in their Assamese form.
The tribal groups,
who do not understand one
another's language, converse in Naga-Assamese or Nagamese. It is a
hybrid mixture of Assamese and Naga languages but serve as the lingua
franca of the Naga people. It does not follow any strict rules of grammar
and is easy to pick up. Nagamese has no script. The missionaries rendered signal service to the Naga
languages. They wrote the first grammar books and compiled vocabularies. The
missionaries used the Roman script.
Hindi is well understood in Nagaland
- even in the interior areas. The
state Assembly, in a resolution adopted on18 September 1967, recommended that English be used for all official purposes within the state of
Nagaland indefinitely, and that English be included as one of the
languages in the VIII schedule of the constitution. But, only a fraction
of the population in the state speak or write English with some degree of
accuracy.
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