Gorum
A near-extinct Munda language of Odisha, India, where creaky voice marks who got affected.
via Wikipedia: Gorum language · see source
Gorum (also Parengi) is a near-extinct minor Munda language of India, spoken by the Parenga people of Odisha state, eastern India. The name Gorum most likely comes from an animal/people prefix go- and root -rum meaning 'people', and is possibly related to the ethnonym Remo. "Parengi" or "Parenga" is of obscure origin. Gorum is 60 percent endangered and may soon become extinct. Few people under the age of thirty years can understand the language, while those who do know it are likely to deny knowing it.
Quick Facts
- States
- India
- Region
- Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
- Ethnicity
- Parenga (9,445 in Odisha (2011 census))
- Speakers
- 20
- Date
- 2011
Lore & Background
Gorum is a member of the Munda family, as shown by the glottal consonants that are used in creaky voice. However, it may have borrowed some elements from nearby Dravidian languages, such as doubly inflected AVC structures. Aside from local Dravidian languages, Limbu, a Tibeto-Burman language in Eastern Nepal also display doubly inflected AVCs, so does Burushaski in the northern periphery of South Asia. Gorum speakers are located in Koraput district, Odisha (the former Nandapur and Pottangi taluks) and Visakhapatnam district, Andhra Pradesh (Munchingput block). Gutob is spoken to the north of Gorum, and Gta to the west of Gorum. This language seems to have been first researched in 1933. Ethnologue (2005) reports a literacy rate of just 11.5% which is seemingly higher in Andhra Pradesh and lower in Odisha.
Reader's Guide
Gorum, like any other Munda languages, does not have a morphological concept of gender. Word pairs that show gender distinction are usually borrowed from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. However, there is at least some kind of word class distinction based on animacy, but the evidence is faint or frozen in Gorum. It has not yet been fully determined whether adjectives exist as a separate lexical category.
If it does, the adjective class is definitely small, consisting of a few uninflectable words such as asaˀj "black", asel "white", lup "big", asuʔ "small". In attributive use, adjectives precede nouns and nearly always attach the attributive suffix -nu. In predicative use, adjectives are expressed with the auxiliary ɖuku ("to be, to stay"). Creaky voice in Gorum is part of the morphology, i.e. grammaticalized, to demonstrate the affectedness of the verb stems.
Although it has been suggested that creaky voice is reconstructible in proto-Austroasiatic, Anderson (2007) raises possibilities of whether Gorum creaky voice is true archaicism or pseudo-archaism.
Did You Know?
- Gorum uses creaky voice vowels grammatically to mark 'affectedness' — who got affected in the action.
- Gorum originally had a decimal counting system, but numbers greater than 7 have been replaced by Indo-Aryan loans.
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