Basic word order in Tai Khamti: Language contact with Burmese

Abstract:

The issue of basic word order in Tai Khamti (hereafter Khamti) has been a topic of debate among linguistics for decades. There is no question that historically it would have been Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), like most Tai languages, but speakers also use Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order, apparently due to contact with neighboring SOV languages. Needham's (1894) grammar states Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) is the basic word order in Khamti. Using data from her own fieldwork, Khanittanan (1986) argued that SVO was all but gone from Khamti, and had fully transitioned to SOV. Diller (1992) showed that the syntactic generalizations laid out by Needham do not always hold, and used data from other Tai languages of Northeast India to argue for pragmatically driven word order, rather than SOV as basic. Morey (2006) introduced extensive additional data from Northeast India, also arguing that Khamti’s verb-final ordering is pragmatically driven.

The Khamti case presents an interesting opportunity to study language contact influence on basic word order, because it has speaker communities in two countries, India and Myanmar, in each country virtually all Khamti speakers are also native (or highly fluent) speakers of different SOV majority languages: Assamese in Northeast India and Burmese in Myanmar. This study updates the Khamti debate with data from a newly documented Khamti dialect spoken in the Upper Chindwin River Valley in northwest Myanmar, and gives the data sociolinguistic context. The data come from a corpus of texts and more than 1,000 elicited sentences gathered 2014-2017. Both word orders are present throughout the data, but the notion of Khamti having basic SVO ordering is a part of the linguistic identity of some community members. At the same time, speakers openly credit Burmese influence for what they see as an ongoing change. This raises the question of the time scale of this kind of change to basic word order, as if a change is indeed ongoing, it has been ongoing for well over a century, and across geographically disparate dialects. It also presents the opportunity for further focused study in order to examine whether the different SOV majority languages have influenced the Khamti dialects differently.