Kho-Bwa languages

The Kho-Bwa languages, also known as Bugunish and Kamengic, are a small family of languages spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India. The name Kho-Bwa is due to Van Driem (2001). It is based on the reconstructed words *kho ("fire") and *bwa ("water"). Blench (2011) suggests the name Kamengic, from the Kameng area of Arunachal Pradesh, or alternatively Bugun–Mey, after its two main members.

Both Van Driem and Blench group the Bugun (or Khowa), the Mey (or Sherdukpen), and the Lishpa (or Lish) languages. The Puroik (or Sulung) language is included in the group by Van Driem but treated as a language isolate with no genetic relation to Kamengic by Blench.

These languages have traditionally been placed in the Tibeto-Burman group by the Linguistic Survey of India, but the justification of this is open to question. The languages have certainly been strongly influenced by the neighboring Sino-Tibetan languages, but this does not necessarily imply genetic unity and may possibly be a purely areal effect.^[2]

The entire language family has about 15,000 speakers (including Puroik) or about 10,000 speakers (excluding Puroik), according to estimates made during the 2000s.

Classification

The internal structure of the Kamengic group of languages is as follows.

• Bugun (Khowa)
• Mey–Sartang
  • Sherdukpen (Mey, Ngnok), divided into two varieties:
    • Shergaon
    • Rupa
  • Sartang (Bootpa, But Monpa, But Pa, Matchopa), 50%–60% lexical similarity with Mey.
• Chug–Lish
  • Lishpa (Lish)
  • Chug (Chug Monpa, Chugpa, Monpa), close to Lish
• (possibly Sulung (Puroik); affiliation doubtful)

Vocabulary

The following table of Kho-Bwa basic vocabulary items is from Blench (2015).^[3]

References

• George van Driem (2001) Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region. Brill.
• Blench, Roger. 2011. (De)classifying Arunachal languages: Reconsidering the evidence