Assamese language

Assamese, also known by its endonyms Asamiya or Oxomiya (অসমীয়া Ôxômiya [ɔxɔmija] ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, where it is an official language. It has long served as a lingua franca in parts of Northeast India. It has over 15 million native speakers and 8.3 million second language speakers according to Ethnologue, although this claim is widely disputed by academics, based on census figures. Assamese was designated as a classical Indian language by the Government of India on 3 October 2024 on account of its antiquity and literary traditions. Nefamese, an Assamese-based pidgin in Arunachal Pradesh, was used as a lingua franca before being replaced by Hindi; and Nagamese, an Assamese-based Creole language, continues to be widely used in Nagaland. The Kamtapuri language of Rangpur Division of Bangladesh and the Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri districts of India is linguistically closest to Assamese and they both are descended from the Kamarupi Prakrit. In the past, it was the court language of the Ahom kingdom from the 17th century. After the differentiation of Maithili and Odia, Assamese was in its formative stages in the 12th century CE from the middle Indo-Aryan Magadhi Prakrit. Its sister languages include Angika, Bengali, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Chakma, Chittagonian, Hajong, Rajbangsi, Surjapuri, Maithili, Rohingya and Sylheti. It has been written in the Assamese script till the 20th century, and the Bengali-Assamese script from the mid-19th century, which are abugida systems, from left to right, with many typographic ligatures.