Bodo is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Bodo people of north-eastern India and Nepal. The language is one of the official languages of the Indian state of Assam, and is one of 22 languages recognized by the Indian constitution.
The word Boro (Bodo) denotes both the language as well as the community and it is pronounced with a high tone on the second syllable. The dialects spoken in this area could be broadly sub-divided into three main groups, the Western Boro dialect (Swnabari) (WBD), the Eastern Boro dialect (Sanzari) (EBD), and the Southern Boro dialect, (Hazari) (SBD).
The Western Boro dialects are spoken in the districts of Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon and the Eastern Bodo dialects are found mainly in the districts of Barpeta, Nalbari and Kamrup and some parts of Darrang as well. It is worthwhile to mention that the Western Boro dialect has gained the status of Standard Dialect and has developed a written form as well. The variations between these two dialect groups are mainly phonological and lexical.
Speakers are primarily found in the Brahmaputra Valley in Assam, and its few adjacent areas of New Jalpaiguri, in West Bengal, with minimum concentration in the northern part of the Brahmaputra Valley. The population of Boro speakers is 11,84,569 according to the 1991 census report.
There are sixteen consonant phonemes including two semi-vowels and six vowel phonemes in the Boro language. The vowel phonemes in Boro language occur in all the three positions, namely initially, medially and word finally. The morphological features of the Boro language corresponds to the ‘Boro-Garo’ group of languages that lie within the Tibeto-Burman sub-family of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Number in Boro is a grammatical category and it has two sets, Singular and Plural. Gender is also a grammatical category in Boro. There are two types of genders: Masculine and Feminine.
