Ahom is an
extinct language of
India, classed among the
Tai languages. It is also the name those who
spoke it.
The Ahoms ruled the lower Brahmaputra valley, modern Assam, for 600 years from their capital at Sibsagar, from the 13th Century to the 19th Century. The Ahoms' own name for themselves was Tai. In Assamese they were called Asam, a word related to Shan and Siamese, both designations of the Tai people. The state of Assam is named for them.
Ahom has had rather little linguistic impact on Assamese, but the Ahom kings encouraged the prose chronicle buranji; first written in Ahom and by the 17th century, one of the glories of Assamese literature.
The written Ahom language had 41 characters. Ahom was almost certainly a tonal language, like its Tai relatives, but the tones were not recorded in the script, and so are now unknown.
How to count to ten in Ahom, with pronunciation in American pseudo-english and IPA/ASCII :
- eat /it/
- chang /tSaN/
- chame /tSeIm/
- chee /tSi/
- hay /heI/
- ruke /ruk/
- seat /sit/
- pate /pet/
- K-O /keIU/
- cheap /tSip/