Goalpariya is a group of Indo-Aryan dialects spoken in the Goalpara region of Assam, India. Along with Kamrupi, they form the western group of Assamese dialects. The North Bengali dialect is situated to its west, amidst a number of Tibeto-Burman speech communities. The basic characteristic of the Goalpariya is that it is a composite one into which words of different concerns and regions have been amalgamated. Deshi people speak this language and there are around 20 lakhs people.
History
The Eastern Magadhi Prakrit gave rise to four historical dialects—Radhi, Varendri, Kamarupi and Vanga. The Kamarupi dialect gave rise to Indo-Aryan speeches of Brahmaputra valley, including Goalpariya, and the KRNB lects spoken outside Assam.
Dialects
There are three identified dialects in this group: (1) Eastern, (2) Western and (3) Intermediate. Scholars from Assam associate these dialects with the Assamese language, Chatterji (1926) classifies Western Goalpariya with the North Bengali dialects and included them, East Goalpariya and Assamese in the Kamarupi branch, classes all Goalpariya dialects, including Eastern Goalpariya (Bongaigaon), in Kamatapuri lects and he also included them and Assamese in the Kamarupi branch.
Birendranath Dutta identifies three main dialects. One he classifies as Eastern Goalpariya, with a number of local variations: the variety around Abhayapuri and Goalpara towns forming one; and the speech around Krishnai, Dudhnai and Dhupdhara, with a large number of Rabha and Boro speakers, forming another. Locally, the varieties of Eastern Goalpariya are given names such as Habraghatiya, Bausiya, Namdaniya and Barahajari. Under Western Goalpariya, Dutta discusses two separate dialects: the variety around Gauripur (locally called Ghulliya); and the variety around Salkocha (locally called Jharua). Dutta considers the Salkocha dialect as the intermediate dialect.
Region
The Goalpara region is the westernmost part of Brahmaputra Valley. It is bounded in north by Bhutan, on the east by Kamrup region, on the south by Garo Hills of Meghalaya and on the west by Cooch Behar district, Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal and Rangpur District of Bangladesh.
In ancient times it was included in Kamarupa. Subsequently, region formed a part of Kamata kingdom.
Later region became a part of the Kamata kingdom and later a part of Koch Hajo, the domain of Raghudeva and Parikshit Narayana, from 1581 to about 1615, when the Mughals took control over the region and constituted a Sarkar. The British received this region as the Diwani of Bengal in the 18th century, and it became a part of Colonial Assam in 1826.
Background and controversies
The Goalpariya dialects have been subject of much controversy, primarily because they fall on a dialect continuum. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a debate on whether they were dialects of Bengali or Assamese languages. The Irish linguist George Abraham Grierson claimed in his Linguistic Survey of India that the western and southern dialects were Rajbonshi, and thus a northern Bengali dialect; and that the eastern dialect was Assamese. Bengali linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji also followed this classification in his thesis, adding western Goalpariya to the northern Bengali dialects. The debate never died down and authors continue to critically examine the nation building aspects of this debate.
Assamese scholars consider Goalpariya is a part of the Assamese dialects, specifically, a western Assamese dialect. The two erstwhile western districts of Assam, Kamrup and Goalpara, possess several local dialects. The Goalpariya dialect is similar to the Rajbonshi dialect which evolved under the Koch dynasty, and also similar to Bengali dialects spoken in northern Bengal. The differences between the eastern and western Assamese dialects are wide and range over the whole field of phonology, morphology and, not infrequently, vocabulary.
Phonology
The dialects of Goalpara straddle the Assamese-Bengali language divides and display features from both languages. Though the phonemes in the eastern dialects approach those of Assamese, the western dialect approach those of Bengali. The distinctive velar fricative /x/ present in Assamese is present in the eastern dialect, but absent in the western dialect. The dental and alveolar distinction in Bengali are found in the western dialect, but merged into alveolars in the eastern dialect in consonance with Assamese. Further the aspirated /ch/ is present in Bengali as well as the western dialect, but absent in eastern Goalparia dialect and Assamese.