Vayu language

Vayu (वायु), Wayu or Hayu (हायु) is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nepal by about 1740 people in Province No. 3. Dialects include Sindhuli and Marin Khola.

This article is about the language spoken in Nepal. For the language of South America, see Wayuu language.
Vayu
Hayu
वायु, हायु
Native toNepal
RegionJanakpur Zone
Native speakers
1,500 (2011 census)[1]
Devanagari
Language codes
ISO 639-3vay
Glottologwayu1241
ELPWayu[2]

The Vayu language features SOV ordering. There are strong Nepali influences in its phonology, lexicon, and grammar. Its writing system uses the Devanagari script. There are no known monolingual speakers of the language, as its speaking population also uses Nepali.[1] Despite a lack of monolingual children, use of Vayu has survived into the 21st century [3]

Phonology

[4]

Vowels
Front Central Back
Close i u
Near-close ɪ ʊ
Open-mid ɛ ɔ
Open a

Geographical distribution

Vayu is spoken in the following locations of Nepal.[1]

Vayu is spoken in the Sun Koshi valley, southwards across the Mahabharat range. Ethnic Vayu live on the hills on both sides of the Sun Kosi River but the language is only spoken in the villages listed.

References
  1. Vayu at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Endangered Languages Project data for Wayu.
  3. Frawley, W. (2003). Wayu. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. (Vol. 4, pp. 536) New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc.
  4. Michailovsky, Boyd. "Hayu".

Bibliography
  • Boyd Michailovsky (1988) La langue hayu. Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
  • Boyd Michailovsky (2003) "Hayu". In Graham Thurgood & Randy LaPolla (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 518–532. London & New York: Routledge.
  • George van Driem (2001) Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region. Brill.

Further reading

Hodgson, B. (1857). Váyu Vocabulary. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 26. 372-485.

Hodgson, B. (1858). On the Vayu tribe of the Central Himalaya. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 27. 443-6.

Michailovsky, B. (1973). Notes on the Hayu language. Kailash : A Journal of Himalayan Studies, 1(2), 135-152.

Michailovsky, B. (1974). Hayu Typology and Verbal Morphology. Linguistics Of The Tibeto-Burman Area, 11-26.

Michailovsky, B. (1976). A Case of Rhinoglottophilia in Hayu. Linguistics Of The Tibeto-Burman Area, 2293.

Park, I. (1995). Grammaticalization of Verbs in Three Tibeto-Burman Languages. Dissertation Abstracts International, 55(8), 2369A.

Sherard, M. (1986). Morphological Structure of the Pronominal and Verb Systems in Two Pronominalized Himalayan Languages. In J. McCoy, T. Light (Eds.) , Contributions to Sino-Tibetan Studies (pp. 172–199). Leiden: Brill.

Yadava, Y. P., Glover, W. W. (1999). Topics in Nepalese Linguistics. In Yadava, Yogendra P. and Warren W. Glover (eds.) Kamaladi, Kathmandu: Royal Nepal Academy. p. 603.


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