Kamarupi

Kamarupi is the Middle Indo-Aryan speech of ancient Kamarupa, the Brahmaputra valley kingdom that held western Assam from the fifth to the twelfth century. Indo-Aryan settlers carried the language up the Brahmaputra by the fourth or fifth century, where it grew among Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic neighbours and took on an Austroasiatic substrate. In the seventh century the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang visited King Bhaskaravarman and found a vernacular distinct from that of Bengal.

A Prakrit of the Magadhi group, it is traced chiefly through provincial forms in the Sanskrit of Kamarupa's copper-plate inscriptions, including the merging of ś and ṣ into s.

Before 1250 it was splitting into proto-Kamta and early Assamese, the parents of later Assamese and Kamatapuri, while its local alphabet became the ancestor of the medieval Assamese scripts.