This is the grammatical description of Duhumbi ngak, the language of the people of Duhum. This description is based on a PhD dissertation submitted to the University of Berne in Switzerland in September 2017. The grammar forms part of a set of printed and open access publications that represent six years of fieldwork in the Chug valley in the western part of the state of Arunachal Pradesh, India. The research in which this grammar culminated is not just based on the Saussurean principle of studying language ‘in and for itself’. Hence, the work lying before you is not just a synchronic descriptive grammar, focusing solely on the structure of the Duhumbi language, but also pays attention to the language as an integral part of the culture of the people who speak it, keeping in mind the history of the speakers and incorporating diachronic aspects whenever deemed illustrative. This grammar contains a short introduction, the detailed grammatical description and four transcribed, glossed and translated texts. The grammar represents the major part of the research and the part of the research that will be of most interest to linguists.
Additional publications are an illustrated Duhumbi-English-Duhumbi dictionary (Bodt, 2020), a Duhumbi storybook (Bodt, 2018), and open access materials published on Zenodo. The Duhumbi-English-Duhumbi dictionary has detailed explanations, illustrations and a reverse English-Duhumbi index. The Duhumbi storybook contains a settlement history of Chug, the story of Shawa Pün Zomba, the biography of Khandro Drowa Zangmo, the epic of Ling Gesar Gepu, the story of Tshongpon Norbu Zangpo, four short fables, the Mani tam riddles and an explanation of the meaning of dreams. These stories are presented in both Duhumbi and the English and Hindi translations. The texts in the storybook were edited to increase readability, but cross-references to the original Toolbox transcriptions have been added.
Most of the data that form the basis of this research are made accessible through the Open Science website Zenodo (
The beneficiaries of this work should ultimately be the people whose language is described here. Unfortunately, at present, educational levels and priorities of the people of the Chug valley lie, understandably, elsewhere. Hopefully, in the future, when a new generation of educated Duhumbi realises how time has affected their language and culture, this grammar, the storybook, the dictionary and the online materials will enable them to recapture and hopefully revitalise the essence of it. This grammar can easily be the basis for a functional grammar of the Duhumbi language.
This grammar is structured as follows. Chapter 1 provides a background of the Duhumbi people: their habitat; their origin and settlement history; their culture, traditions and livelihoods; and their language. Chapter 2 discusses the segmental phonology of Duhumbi and the two orthographic systems designed for the language. In Chapter 3, I define the Duhumbi parts of speech and their general characteristics, whereas Chapter 4 presents a variety of topics related to the Duhumbi lexicon. The entire Chapter 5 is devoted to the important topic of nominalisations, which form an important feature of the language. Chapter 6 presents the Duhumbi noun phrase and all aspects related to it. Whereas Chapter 7 describes the morphology of verbal forms, Chapter 8 focuses on non-verbal predicates. Chapter 9 describes the ‘serial verb constructions’, an important part of the Duhumbi grammar. Chapter 10 discusses several types of non-declarative Duhumbi clauses. In Chapter 11, I discuss the syntactic structure of more complex sentences in Duhumbi, including ways of subordination and coordination of two or more clauses. Chapter 12 has been named as ‘discourse structure’ because of its main function: to present those grammatical elements in the language that bring structure to the information that the speaker presents to the addressee(s). In Chapter 13, I present the metadata of the texts and the speakers, and four parsed, glossed, annotated and translated Duhumbi texts.