Language

Chintang (ISO 639-3: ctn) is spoken primarily in the eponymous municipality (Chintang Village Development Committee) in eastern Nepal's Dhankuta district. Only in the early 2000s did linguists recognize Chintang as a distinct language not mutually intelligible with its neighbours. Since then, research has been undertaken with respect to ethnography, language, and language acquisition in the framework of the Chintang and Puma Documentation Project (2004-2009) and subsequently by the Chintang Language Research Programme.

Genealogically, Chintang belongs to the Eastern branch of the Kiranti language family within Sino-Tibetan. The closest siblings are Athpare (aph), Belhare (byw), Chɨlɨng (cur) and Yakkha (ybh).

As for a short glimpse into some of its typological features, the Chintang language

• prefers SOV word order in simple clauses, but all arguments can be omitted
  (nominal constituents are similarly head-final, yielding Adjective-Noun and Relative Clause-Noun orders)
• exhibits ergativity in morphology and syntax
• features rich inflectional morphology and a high degree of synthesis. Nouns inflect for case and number; certain cases can be stacked onto others (Poppitz 2008). Verbs agree with both agent and patient in person (for agent also clusivity) and number (singular/dual/plural), and further inflect for tense, aspect, mood, and polarity
• permits free permutation of prefixes (Bickel et al. 2007)
• employs a “fluid” concept of argument structure: verbs can assume different argument configurations without dedicated morphological marking (Schikowski, Paudyal and Bickel 2010)
• has an absolute system for spatial reference based on hill inclination that can be flexibly projected onto the environment (Dirksmeyer 2008)

Geography

The Chintang settlement consists of hamlets more or less loosely scattered along (and around) the western end of the Khalsa ridge in the Himalayan foothills, near the confluence of the Sunkoshi, Arun and Tamur rivers. The Chintang live between (roughly) 900 and 1300 metres of altitude, where paddies can hold back enough water to make the otherwise very tilted terrain arable. To this end, most of the original woodland has been cleared for cultivation (or chopped for firewood), further increasing the landslide hazard in the area.

The dirt road recently built along the ridge, motorable during the dry season (September/October to April/May), connects the two main village clusters of Chintang (Mulgaũ and Sambugaũ) with the town of Hile to the northeast. The hamlets at higher and lower altitudes can only be reached via steep trails, resulting in their inhabitants speaking "hamletolects" noticeably distinct from their neighbours above and below.

People and Culture

Population estimates vary: official figures from the 2001 Nepal census suggest that the Chintang municipality (VDC) was inhabited by some 9,000 individuals at the time, more recent estimates assume that 3,000 – 5,000 people speak the Chintang language. While the language is still being learned by some children, many speakers nowadays shift to Bantawa (bap, another Kiranti language dominant in the surrounding area) or Nepali (nep, the state's official language and genealogically unrelated). All Chintang speakers are at least bilingual in either of these.

Most people practice subsistence agriculture, the staple crops being rice, millet, and maize. In addition, some of the produce is sold for cash, notably ginger, oranges, and tomatoes.

The Chintang share many cultural traits with other Kiranti-Rai groups, such as an indigenous, animist ancestral religion. But Chintang is also a religious center whose significance extends far beyond the immediate region and the Kiranti creed: pilgrims of various religious persuasions come from all over eastern Nepal (and sometimes all the way from India) to worship the goddess Sri Chintang Jalpa Devi at her temple in a sacred grove that forms an important core to the Chintang settlements. Catering to the pilgrims – providing food, accommodation, transportation, sacrificial animals, etc. – constitutes another pillar of the local economy.

Furthermore, Chintang is (in)famous as the venue where a communist insurgency was forcibly suppressed in 1979. A "martyr's park" commemorating the victims welcomes the present-day visitor at the entrance to Chintang municipality.

Publications

• Bickel, Balthasar, Goma Banjade, Martin Gaenszle, Elena Lieven, Netra Prasad Paudyal, Ichchha Purna Rai, Manoj Rai, Novel Kishore Rai and Sabine Stoll. 2007. Free prefix ordering in Chintang. Language 83(1):1–31. [PDF]
• Bickel, Balthasar, Manoj Rai, Netra P. Paudyal, Goma Banjade, Toya N. Bhatta, Martin Gaenszle, Elena Lieven, Ichchha Purna Rai, Novel Kishore Rai and Sabine Stoll. 2010. The syntax of three-argument verbs in Chintang and Belhare (Southeastern Kiranti). In: Malchukov, Andrej, Martin Haspelmath and Bernard Comrie (eds.), Studies in ditransitive constructions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 382–408. [PDF]
• Dirksmeyer, Tyko. 2008. Spatial deixis in Chintang: Aspects of a grammar of space. MA thesis, University of Leipzig. [PDF]
• Gaenszle, Martin, Balthasar Bickel, Goma Banjade, Elena Lieven, Netra Paudyal, Ichchha Rai, Manoj Rai, Novel Kishor Rai and Sabine Stoll. 2005. Worshiping the King God: A preliminary analysis of Chintang ritual language in the invocation of Rajdeu. In: Yadava, Yogendra P., G. Bhattarai, R.R. Lohani, B. Prasain and K. Parajuli (eds.), Contemporary issues in Nepalese linguistics. Kathmandu: Linguistic Society of Nepal. 33–47. [PDF]
• Paudyal, Netra P., Balthasar Bickel, Robert Schikowski, Sabine Stoll, Elena Lieven, Goma Banjade, Ichchha P. Rai, Manoj Rai, Martin Gaenszle, Novel K. Rai, Toya N. Bhatta. 2010. Non-finite adverbial subordination in Chintang. Nepalese Linguistics 25:121–132. [PDF]
• Poppitz, S. 2008. Case, case composition, and adverbs in Chintang. MA thesis, University of Leipzig.
• Rai, Novel Kishore, Balthasar Bickel, Martin Gaenszle, Elena Lieven, Netra Paudyal, Ichchha Purna Rai, Manoj Rai and Sabine Stoll. 2005. Triplication and ideophones in Chintang. In: Yadava, Yogendra P. (ed.), Current issues in Nepalese linguistics. Kathmandu: Linguistic Society of Nepal. [PDF]
• Rai, Ichchha Purna, Balthasar Bickel, Elena Lieven, Goma Banjade, Martin Gaenszle, Manoj Rai, Netra P. Paudyal, Novel K. Rai, Sabine Stoll and Toya N. Bhatta. 2009. Mundum: A case study of Chintang ritual language. In: Mukherjee, R. and M.N. Rajesh (eds.), Locality, history, memory: The making of the citizen in South Asia. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. 20–33.
• Schikowski, Robert, Netra Paudyal and Balthasar Bickel. 2010. Fluid transitivity in Chintang. Paper presented at the Workshop on Valency Classes, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. August 21, 2010. [PDF]
• Stoll, Sabine, Balthasar Bickel, Elena Lieven, Goma Banjade, Toya N. Bhatta, Martin Gaenszle, Netra P. Paudyal, Judith Pettigrew, Ichchha Purna Rai, Manoj Rai and Novel Kishore Rai. in press. Nouns and verbs in Chintang: children’s usage and surrounding adult speech. Journal of Child Language. [PDF]

Photos

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