Gurung language

Gurung
Tamu Kyi
Native to	Nepal
Ethnicity	Gurung people
Native speakers	360,000 (2007)[1]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Tamangic Gurung
Writing system	Tibetan script, Devanagari script
Official status
Official language in	Nepal Sikkim
Language codes
ISO 639-3	gvr
Glottolog	guru1261[2]

Selected ethnic groups of Nepal; Bhotia, Sherpa, Thakali, Gurung, Kiranti, Rai, Limbu, Nepal Bhasa, Pahari, Tamang

Gurung (also, Tamu Kyi, Devanagari:तमु क्यी) is spoken by the Gurung people in two dialects with limited mutual intelligibility. Total number of all Gurung speakers in Nepal is 227,918 (1991 census). However, a distinction should be made between Gurung as an ethnic group and the number of people who actually speak the language.

Nepali, Nepal's official language, is an Indo-European language, whereas Gurung is a Sino-Tibetan language. Gurung are recognized as an official nationality by the Government of Nepal.

Geographical distribution

Gurung is spoken in the following districts of Nepal (Ethnologue).

• Gandaki Zone: Kaski District, Syangja District, Lamjung District, Tanahu District, and western Gorkha District, and possibly Manang District
• Dhawalagiri Zone: Parbat district

Grammar

Some miscellaneous grammatical features of the Gurung languages are;

• SOV;
• postpositions;
• genitives;
• adjectives relatives before noun heads;
• numerals after noun heads;
• rising intonation in bipolar questions;
• 1 prefix on negative verbs;
• maximum number of suffixes 3;
• case of noun phrase shown by preposition;
• no subject or object referencing in verbs;
• split ergative system according to tense;
• causatives;
• benefactives;
• CV, CCV, CCCV;

Phonetically, Gurung languages are tonal.

Writing system

Gurung languages did not originally have a script and are therefore written in the Tibetan script which was adopted when the Gurung peoples embraced Vajrayana Buddhism, particularly of the Nyingma school. Supposedly, Devanāgarī script had also been used but only to a limited effect in approximating their phonetics.

See also

• Languages of Nepal
• Languages of Bhutan

References

1. Gurung at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Gurung". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.