Khammoun Phukan

This article is an attempt to explore the role of Tai Ahom proverbs as a marker of cultural identity in the realm of postmodern society. Using or choosing culturally driven speech in communication is a linguistic behaviour which reflects the character of the people, their worldview, and thus their uniqueness or difference from the ‘other’. In another way, this might be a conscious way of projecting self. This qualitative study on proverbs of Tai Ahom language and culture adopts the methods of ethnography and textual analysis. A cultural hermeneutic model, along with the participant observation method, was used to collect the data. Finally, the Tai Ahom community of Sivasagar district of Assam, India was chosen as the locus for the research. The findings show that the proverbs are deeply woven by the Ahom community's cultural heritage, history, pride, advice, and satire. Hence, this article provides an insight into Tai Ahoms’ way of living and their worldview. In locating the Tai...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the kinship relationship among the Tai Ahoms of Assam and thereby to understand the community"s family structure and the code of conduct. Another purpose of this study is to look at the present cultural context of the uses of kinship terminologies where a particular kinship term may have different connotations. To carry out the research, the participant observation method was used. A set of questionnaires and a semi-structured group interview were used as a tool to collect data. Both the emic and etic understandings were used to investigate the inner cultural knot of the community. The study finds out that the Tai Ahom kinship relationship could be summarised into three categories : agnatic, matrilateral, and affinal.Family is central to kinship relations, where a relationship is given more importance than the interlocutor"s age and gender. An ethnolinguistic analysis of the Tai Ahom kinship terms would help the researchers to locate the human bonding and the cultural affinities and thereby to locate the basic structure of the society. This study can be useful in the identity research areas and the present scenario of the identity assertion movement in Assam.The study of the kinship terminologies from an ethnolinguistic perspective has not been discussed yet. Therefore, the study of kinship patterns is new and original to this study.

The present study tries to explore and describe the phenomenon of kinship terms in Tai Ahom of Assam. The Tai Ahom language is no longer used as a mother tongue but still the language is vibrant in some domains of culture and society. As a language it is dead but as a vehicle of culture it still persists the hope of endurance. The people of the community have been consistently struggling for the maintenance since last six decades. The maintenance or the using of new kinship terms based on the forgotten symbol is one of the endeavours of projecting the „self‟ and „identity‟. The paper attempts to deal with the ethnolinguistic account of Tai Ahom kinship terms through the theoretical framework of Dell Hymes‟ Ethnography of Communication. Following the ethnographic data collection technique, we observe here the changes of kinship terms along with their cultural connotation. Here we focus on the  communicative goals which influence the speakers to maintain certain
linguistic behaviour interlaced with cultural values, social norms, institutions, taboos etc.

It is believed that Hemchandra Barua’s Hemkosh (1900) is the first Assamese Dictionary and Miles Bronson’s A Dictionary in Assamese and English (1867) is the first bilingual dictionary published in Assamese language. But interestingly the first folio of dictionary was drafted in 1795 AD in Tai and Assamese language; on the other hand Hemkosh came out in 1900 AD. Under the framework of lexicography, this paper intends to look at the pre-Hemkosh era of dictionary writing in three different approaches: (1) A historical account of dictionary writing of pre Hemkosh era, (2) A linguistic account of select dictionaries and (3) An analysis of the beginning of Assamese standardisation. The research would be based primarily on secondary sources consisting library works and unpublished manuscripts.

Keywords: Assam, classical dictionaries, dictionary-making, pre-Hemkosh, dictionary-standardisation