Assamese is the easternmost Indo-Aryan language. It is used mainly in the state of Assam in North-East India. It is also the official language of Assam. It is also spoken in parts of Arunachal Pradesh and other northeast Indian states. Nagamese, an Assamese-based Creole is widely used in Nagaland and parts of Assam. Small pockets of Assamese speakers can be found in Bhutan.
Assamese has derived its phonetic character set and its behaviour from Sanskrit. It is written using the Assamese script. Assamese is written from left to right and top to bottom, in the same manner as English. A large number of ligatures are possible since potentially all the consonants can combine with one another. Vowels can either be independent or dependent upon a consonant or a consonant cluster.
The English word "Assamese" is built on the same principle as "Japanese", "Taiwanese", etc. It is based on the name "Assam" by which the tract consisting of the Brahmaputra valley was known.
Assamese became the court language in the Ahom kingdom by the 17th century.
Assamese uses the Assemese script, a variant of the Eastern Nagari script, which traces its descent from the Gupta scrip t. It resembles very closely to the Mithilashar script of the Maithili language as well as to the Bengali script. There is a strong tradition of writing from early times. Examples can be seen in edicts, land grants and copper plates of medieval kings. Assam had its own system of writing on the bark of the saanchi tree in which religious texts and chronicles were written. The present-day spellings in Assamese are not necessarily phonetic. Hemkosh second Assamese dictionary, introduced spellings based on Sanskrit which are now the standard.
The Assamese language has the following characteristic morphological features
§ Gender and number are not grammatically marked
§ There is lexical distinction of gender in the third person pronoun.
§ Transitive verbs are distinguished from intransitive.
§ The agentive case is overtly marked as distinct from the accusative.
§ Kinship nouns are inflected for personal pronominal possession.
§ Adverbs can be derived from the verb roots.
§ A passive construction may be employed idiomatically.
