Gorum

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Gorum is a member of the Munda family, as shown by the glottal consonants that are used in creaky voice. However, it may have borrowed some elements from nearby Dravidian languages, such as doubly inflected AVC structures. Aside from local Dravidian languages, Limbu, a Tibeto-Burman language in Eastern Nepal also display doubly inflected AVCs, so does Burushaski in the northern periphery of South Asia. Gorum speakers are located in Koraput district, Odisha (the former Nandapur and Pottangi taluks) and Visakhapatnam district, Andhra Pradesh (Munchingput block). Gutob is spoken to the north of Gorum, and Gta to the west of Gorum. This language seems to have been first researched in 1933. Ethnologue (2005) reports a literacy rate of just 11.5% which is seemingly higher in Andhra Pradesh and lower in Odisha.

In Their Own Story

During their 2008 linguistic expedition in Koraput, Anderson and Rau attested Gorum's native numbers. Although numbers greater than 7 have been replaced by Indo-Aryan, Gorum originally may have a decimal counting system, indicated by older reports. The language distinguishes two numbers on nominals: unmarked singular and plural -gi. Noun phrases are marked for possession, occurring primarily with inalienable nouns — body parts, kin terms, and some socioculturally determined terms like irrigated rice fields. Gorum has two types of nominal marking to demonstrate clausal relation: objective/oblique/recipient marker e- and locative postposition etur, though the conditions of variation in both cases and whether they carry any productive meaning remain unclear.

Reader's Guide

Gorum, like any other Munda languages, does not have a morphological concept of gender. Word pairs that show gender distinction are usually borrowed from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. However, there is at least some kind of word class distinction based on animacy, but the evidence is faint or frozen in Gorum. It has not yet been fully determined whether adjectives exist as a separate lexical category. If it does, the adjective class is definitely small, consisting of a few uninflectable words such as asaˀj "black", asel "white", lup "big", asuʔ "small". In attributive use, adjectives precede nouns and nearly always attach the attributive suffix -nu. In predicative use, adjectives are expressed with the auxiliary ɖuku ("to be, to stay"). Creaky voice in Gorum is part of the morphology, i.e. grammaticalized, to demonstrate the affectedness of the verb stems. Although it has been suggested that creaky voice is reconstructible in proto-Austroasiatic, Anderson (2007) raises possibilities of whether Gorum creaky voice is true archaicism or pseudo-archaism.

Did You Know?

• Gorum is 60 percent endangered and may soon become extinct; few people under thirty can understand it, and those who know it often deny knowing it.
• The name Gorum likely comes from an animal/people prefix go- and root -rum meaning 'people', possibly related to the ethnonym Remo.
• Gorum uses creaky voice vowels grammatically to mark 'affectedness' — who got affected in the action.
• Gorum originally had a decimal counting system, but numbers greater than 7 have been replaced by Indo-Aryan loans.
• The language was first researched in 1933, and Ethnologue (2005) reports a literacy rate of just 11.5%.