Dictionary of the Apatani Language: Apatani-English Dictionary (with English-Apatani Index)

The Apatani language, or Tanii agun, is spoken by some 26,000 people living in the State of Arunachal Pradesh, India. It has been listed by UNESCO as a “definitely endangered” language. Apatani belongs to the Tani branch of the Tibeto-Burman family. It is a tonal language that also contrasts vowel and consonant length. Dialectical variations exist but are not very important, and the fact that all Apatani can freely understand each other fosters in them a secure sense of common identity. Apatani is a highly agglutinative language, marked by the profusion of verbal suffixes denoting various tenses, moods and aspects. Any action can be expressed a few dozen ways by adding to the verb root various combinations of inflectional or derivational suffixes, along with several types of reduplication. Each of the many resulting forms gives different shades of meaning to the verb. Major lexical categories are nouns, verbs and adjectives. The language also has a wide array of classifiers and a case-marking system.