Bengali and other Related Dialects of South Assam

South Assam, by which the Old Cachar region and the present Cachar and karimganj districts are known, is a very important linguistic area. The present work gives a description of the dialects of this region. These disalects are Cachar Bengali, Bishnupriya Manipur, Dheyan, Cachar Hindustani and Cachar Oriya,. The last two are the descendants of the immigrants brought as tea garden labourers in the late last and early this century. Cachar Bengali is the Bengali as spoken in Cachar and karimganj and is a very doselylinked with Sylhet Bengali of Sylthet in Bangaladesh.The two are customarily called Syltheti in outside world. The present workis a comparative and descriptive study of languages and can be roughly called a survey of the dialects present in the region have not been considered at all. These are the speeches of Tibeto-Burmese group and as such they do not come up. However, the work deals with the dialects under survey from the view of ethnography as well as ethnology and then analyses them phonetically, historically and comparatively. Comparison is made with each of these dialects and languages as also with the languages from outside like Standard Bengali, Assamese, Hindi and Oriya. Never before such a broad-based survey had been undertaken in the region. The present study is important from another aspect also. This is the only comprehensive research on south Assam dialects which has resulted in a large number of valuable findings, some of them completely new for the Indo-Aryan linguists.