Topics in Marma (မာရမာ)

Abstract

Marma¹ an endangered indigenous language of Bangladesh, is spoken by approximately 200,000 Marma individuals residing in Bangladesh’s southern region called the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). Marma language is closely related to Rakhine and Burmese, and many lexical items are almost identical to those in Burmese and Rakhine, “although Marma exhibits a more conservative phonological profile than Burmese in the grammatical particles” Keisuke (2011). This research study analyzed several morphemes and their roles in shaping discourse structures in Marma information structure (topic-focus articulation). Marma has “agglutinative morphology”, meaning words are formed by stringing together morphemes in specific sequences. We observed prefixation, suffixation, and infixation in Marma. We analyzed the multifunctionality of these selective morphemes [“က=ga/ka, ကိ ု =go/ko, စာ=cha,ရာ=ra, ယည်=yi”] within Marma discourse and explored their implications for a better understanding of information structure in Marma language. At the end of this paper, through instrumental analysis, we proposed three tones in Marma (i.High and creaky, ii. low, and iii. falling).

Key words: Marma, indigenous language, information structure, topic and focus,morphology and tone.

¹“According to Bradley (1985:180), the Marma group would have first migrated from Arakan to the Chittagong Hill Tracts by the early sixteenth century and then after the Burmese conquest in 1785. They live mainly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts where they form one of the main Indigenous groups ( Htin, 2015) ”