Case Markers in Bodo and Sanzari Bodo: A Comparative Investigation

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to investigate and compare the case markers of Bodo and Sanzari Bodo - a variety of Bodo. A Tibeto-Burman language, Bodo is primarily spoken in the north eastern state of Assam, India. Because of immense ethno linguistic diversity the region of Bodoland has attracted numerous linguistic studies from across the globe but due to geographical isolation there are pockets which are left with undocumented language varieties. The present research is based on the data obtained from 20 Sanzari Bodo speakers of Nagaon district of Assam. Though the standard Bodo and Sanzari Bodo share the same number of case markers they have some evident differences between them. Case is a grammatical category which expresses the semantic relation between a noun phrase and its predicate. There are at least ten case markers in both Bodo as well as Sanzari Bodo. Close investigation of data establishes that despite sharing similarities, the two varieties have their uniqueness too, for example, the accusative case marker of Bodo {-kʰɯu} is monophthongised to {-kʰɯ}, the final /ŋ/ sound of instrumental, comitative and allative cases are removed in Sanzari Bodo and the illative case too has different manifestations in the two varieties.