Sümi language

Sümi
Sümi (Naga)
Pronunciation	[sɨ˧ mi˩]
Native to	India
Region	Nagaland
Ethnicity	Sümi Naga
Native speakers	350,000 (2011 census)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Angami–Pochuri Sümi
Language codes
ISO 639-3	nsm
Glottolog	sumi1235
ELP	Sumi Naga

Sümi, also Sema, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nagaland, India. It is spoken by the Sümi Naga people. It differs from every other Naga languages due to the presence of guttural sounds.

Geographical distribution

Sümi is spoken in central and southern Nagaland, mainly in Zünheboto District. There are also good number of speakers in parts of Niuland, Dimapur, Chümoukedima and Kiphire District(s), as well as in 7 villages of Tinsukia District, Assam (Ethnologue).

Dialects

Ethnologue lists the following dialects of Sümi.

• Dayang (Western Sümi)
• Lazami
• Jimomi
• Zumomi

Phonology

The transcriptions in this section use the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Vowels

Monophthongs of Sema, from Teo (2012:368)

The vowels of Sümi are as follows:

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

Notes:

• The close front and the close central vowels have been variously described as near-close [i̞, ɨ̞] and close [i, ɨ]. The close back vowel has only been described as close [u].
  • In the word-medial position, /ɨ/ can be realized as mid [ə].
• The mid vowels /e, o/ can be realized as either close-mid [e, o] or open-mid [ɛ, ɔ].
  • Teo (2012) describes the close-mid allophone of /o/ as slightly advanced [o̟].
• /a/ has been variously described as near-open [ɐ] and open [ä].
  • After uvular stops, /a/ can be realized as open back unrounded [ɑ].

Consonants

The consonants of Sümi are as follows:

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal	plain	m	n		ŋ
	aspirated	mʱ	nʱ
Plosive	voiceless	p	t		k	q
	aspirated	pʰ	tʰ		kʰ	qʰ
	voiced	b	d		ɡ
Affricate	voiceless		tʃ ~ ts
	aspirated		tʃʰ ~ tsʰ
Fricative	voiceless	f	ʃ ~ s		x		h
	voiced	v ~ w	ʒ ~ z		ɣ
Approximant			ɹ	j
Lateral	plain		l
	aspirated		lʱ

Bibliography

• Sreedhar, Mangadan Veetil (1976), Sema phonetic reader, Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages
• Sreedhar, Mangadan Veetil (1980), A Sema Grammar, Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages
• Teo, Amos B. (2012), "Sumi (Sema)", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 42 (3): 365–373, doi:10.1017/S0025100312000254
• Teo, Amos B. (2014), A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland, Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics, ISBN 978-1-922185-10-5

External links

• Sümi DoReCo corpus compiled by Amos Teo. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations.