Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 4, 2026

Angami language

Angami, also called Tenyidie, is a Naga language spoken in the Naga Hills in the northeastern part of India, in Kohima district, Nagaland. In 2011, there is an estimate of 153,000 first language (L1) Angami speakers. Under the UNESCO's Language Vitality and Endangerment framework, Angami is at the level of "vulnerable", meaning that it is still spoken by most children, but "may be restricted to certain domains".

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Jun 4, 2026
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Wikipedia ↗
Angami
Native toIndia
RegionNagaland
EthnicityAngami Naga
Native speakers
150,000 (2011 census)1
Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3njm
Glottologanga1288
Angami is classified as Vulnerable by the UNESCO Language Vitality and Endangerment framework

Angami, also called Tenyidie,2 is a Naga language spoken in the Naga Hills in the northeastern part of India, in Kohima district, Nagaland. In 2011, there is an estimate of 153,000 first language (L1) Angami speakers.1 Under the UNESCO's Language Vitality and Endangerment framework, Angami is at the level of "vulnerable", meaning that it is still spoken by most children, but "may be restricted to certain domains".3

Documentation

A wealth of Angami grammars, lexicons are available in Tenyidie and in English. However, these collections often conflict in their analysis of the phonemic or syntactic nature of the language. This is due to the difference at the time of the documentation, and the choice of informants from varying dialect. Especially in the earlier language documentations (1870s–1960s), mostly by Christian missionary; their informants' meta-data were not specified and any dialect of Angami were assumed to be the "standard" of Angami within the Nagaland region. The Angami-English Phrasebook 4 and Angami-English-Hindi dictionary 5 available online.

Text collection

The complete Tenyidie bible was published in 1970. However, only the translated chapter of Genesis 6 from the bible was posted on the internet under The Rosetta Project. Also, Christian devotional materials such as The Bible...Basically® in Tenyidie 7 are also available online.

Another source of text is largely from the ethnic folktales (e.g. Angami Naga folklore by Sekhose, 1970) and especially from song lyrics written in Tenyidie. Other than Christian songs written by the Angami church community (e.g. Shieshülie songbook by Baptist Revival Church8), the rising rock music culture started to stir in the Nagaland as the music events and societies like the Hornbill National Rock Contest 9

The next largest source of Tenyidie is the educational materials used in the Kohima schools and university. Although much of these texts are in printed forms, a query on the web does retrieve some Indian exams papers 1011 that contain test questions on Tenyidie.

See also

See also

References

References

  1. Angami at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  2. Angami, Teisovi; Kevichüsa-Ezung, Mimi; Singh, Sanasam Ranbir; Tuithung, Themrichon (2025). "Evaluation of the morphological rules for the Tenyidie language: a low-resource language". Language Resources and Evaluation. 59: 3189–3214. doi:10.1007/s10579-024-09788-y.
  3. Moseley, Christopher (ed.). 2010. Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, 3rd edn. Paris, UNESCO Publishing. Online version: http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas
  4. Rivenburg, S.W. (1905). Angami-English Phrasebook.
  5. Giridha, P.P and Handoo, L. (1987). Angami-English-Hindi dictionary. "A n u k r i t i . N e T". Archived from the original on 12 November 2011. Retrieved 22 August 2012.
  6. The Bible Society of India. (1970). The Holy Bible: Angami Naga – Genesis Translation. The Long Now Foundation. https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_njm_gen-1
  7. Griffin, R. (n.d.). The Bible…Basically® in Tenyidie. "Tenyidie". Archived from the original on 5 March 2012. Retrieved 22 August 2012.
  8. Baptist Revival Church (2011). Shieshülie - Tenyidie songbook. Retrieved from http://www.nagalandpost.com/ShowStory.aspx?npoststoryiden=UzEwNDA3Nzk%3D-ZxNlAmDAZ8A%3D Archived 29 July 2013 at the Wayback Machine
  9. www.site5.com. "Hornbill Festival - Hornbill festival of Nagaland". Hornbill Festival. Retrieved 14 April 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  10. "Secondary School Syllabus" (PDF). Nagaland Board of School Education. pp. 48–52. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 July 2011. Retrieved 25 May 2018.
  11. "Higher Secondary School Syllabus for Classes 11 & 12" (PDF). Nagaland Board of School Education. p. 36. Archived from the original (PDF) on 12 September 2012. Retrieved 22 August 2012.

Bibliography

  • Blankenship, Barbara; Peter Ladefoged; Peri Bhaskararao; Nichumeno Chase (June 1993). "Phonetic Structures of Khonoma Angami". Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages. 84. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics: 127–141.

Notes

External links