Kera’a is spoken by less than 16,000 people (Peck 2020), which puts it in the category of threatened languages, primarily in Lower Dibang Valley and Dibang Valley districts of Arunachal Pradesh, India. The researchers that work for this language at the University of Freiburg (Uta Reinöhl, Naomi Peck, Wifek Bouaziz) collected data mainly in Roing and Koronu (Lower Dibang Valley) and Anini (Dibang Valley).

Linguistic structures

One of the best ways of distinguishing between the two main dialects of Kera’a, Midu and Mithu, is through the presence or absence of initial consonants in some words (Reinöhl 2022, Culhane et al. 2023). In Mithu, these initial consonants are retained, while the consonants in Midu are lost. As such, we can describe Mithu as a “conservative” dialect. The presence of initial consonants in Mithu can help us to uncover how Kera’a is related to other languages in the area.
MithuMiduEnglish translation
bili ili ‘pig’
hata ata ‘food’
kato ato ‘hand’
meto ata ‘food’
pathi athi ‘brother’s sister’
The Kera’a community is a rare example of a culture in Northeast India which has maintained shamanic traditions even under recent pressure from Christianism and Hinduism. The ritual language of the shamans, Igu, is rich in mythology, and has linguistic features that differ in part from Kera’a. One example is how speakers indicate the subjects of sentences. While Kera’a speakers almost always use the marker -me to indicate the subject of a sentence, shamans only occasionally use -me when speaking Igu (Reinöhl, Pulu and Wallner, subm.).

Igu

  1. mudu    atoli     thru-zu-za-ne

    sky        Atoli     run-?-come-CONVERB

    ‘Atoli (the spirit of tongs) came running from the sky, …’

     

  2. echa-me                     bra-la

    this-NOMINATIVE     grow-PERFECTIVE

    ‘this grows …’

Kera’a

  1. Machi-me                     pra.

    water-NOMINATIVE    good

    ‘The water is good.’

     

  2. Ini        mreya-me                   aphu.

    1PL     man-NOMINATIVE    weave

    ‘We men weave.’

     

  3. Ini Dibu-me                         Ini Mengga’a               a-we.

    Ini_Dibu-NOMINATIVE      Ini_Mengga’a              birth-NOMINALISER

    ‘Ini Dibu gave birth to Ini Mengga’a.’

References

Culhane, Kirsten, Naomi Peck & Uta Reinöhl. 2023. The mystery of word-initial consonant loss in Kera’a. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/doi:10.31235/osf.io/zvfdw.

Peck, Naomi. 2020. Kera’a (Arunachal Pradesh, India) – Language Snapshot. Language Documentation and Description 19. 26–34.

Reinöhl, Uta. 2022. Locating Kera’a (Idu Mishmi) in Its Linguistic Neighbourhood: Evidence from Dialectology. In Mark W. Post, Stephen Morey & Toni Huber (eds.), Ethnolinguistic Prehistory of the Eastern Himalaya, 232–263. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004518049_010.

Reinöhl, Uta, Pachu Pulu and Usha Wallner. Submitted. A sketch grammar of Igu - The Shamanic language of the Kera’a.