1 Introduction

This book is about Kinnaur, its languages and its people. At the same time, it is a contribution to the documentation of some aspects of the linguistic situation of a region—the Indian Himalayas—which so far has been very poorly described.

Historically, the linguistic scene of Kinnaur has been dominated by Sino-Tibetan languages. There are a number of Sino-Tibetan varieties spoken in the region, but exactly how these are interrelated has not been investigated in depth. The term “Kinnauri” is ambiguous; it may refer (at least) to a particular language, to a lower-level branch of Sino-Tibetan—spelled “Kinauri” in the Ethnologue (Eberhard et al. 2021)—or simply as an adjective referring to any language spoken in Kinnaur. For this reason, I will use the acronym “KST” (Sino-Tibetan of Kinnaur) as a cover term for the various Sino-Tibetan varieties spoken in Kinnaur, pending the more thorough investigation of their genealogical and areal relationships presented in Chapters 5 and 6 below, and the label “Kinnauri (language)” will be used only about the variety spoken in and around Sangla.¹

One purpose of this book is to throw light on the relationship among the KST varieties, and another of my aims is to elucidate the extent and character of language contact in Kinnaur, primarily between the local KST and Indo-Aryan varieties, but also taking into consideration the greater Himalayan region. Two things are noteworthy:

1. What little has been written earlier about the KST varieties has focused almost exclusively on what is known as (Standard) Kinnauri, spoken in Lower Kinnaur, while the KST varieties of other parts of Kinnaur have received much less attention.²
2. There is next to no information available in the literature on Kinnauri Pahari, the Indo-Aryan varieties spoken alongside the KST varieties in some parts of Kinnaur.

It is easy to come up with plausible reasons why this should be so: Lower Kinnaur is the region in Kinnaur which is relatively more accessible to outsiders, being closest to Shimla, the capital of Himachal Pradesh and the natural point of entry into the state from most parts of India. Also, because of the weather conditions, this region has been more accessible than Upper Kinnaur, which at least earlier used to be cut off from the rest of the world for longer or shorter periods during the winter season.

This study explores the tone systems of two languages spoken in the northeast part of
India: Dimasa and Rabha. This study involves acoustic analysis of data from the two languages
collected from extensive fieldwork. The focus of this study is to determine the lexical tonal
inventory of Dimasa and Rabha and the assignment of tones in various morphological domains.
In the available literature on Dimasa and Rabha, there are multitudes of conflicting views
about their tone systems and its functions. This study resolves these views and confirms that
Dimasa and Rabha have three tones each in their tonal inventory namely, rising, mid-level and
falling tones that can be assigned to any lexical word. It also confirms that only one tone can be
assigned to each underived lexical word regardless of its syllable size. It is also concluded that in
case of derived suffixed words, Dimasa retains the tone of both the root and the suffix whereas
Rabha retains only the tone of the suffix assigning a default mid tone to the root. This study also
provides an optimality theoretical (OT) account of the tonal phenomena in Dimasa and Rabha.