Khasi

Khasi is the principal language of the Khasic branch of Austroasiatic, an isolated relative of the Munda tongues, spoken by the Khasi people of the Shillong Plateau in Meghalaya, with smaller communities in Assam and Bangladesh. Its sister speeches include Pnar, War and Lyngngam, and together they form an ancient Austroasiatic enclave in north-eastern India, preserved as Indo-Aryan and Sino-Tibetan languages spread around them.

Khasi makes wide use of prefixes and infixes, places classifiers between numerals and nouns, and divides its nouns into four genders. The Khasi were organized into small matrilineal hill states and long kept their speech without a script; their polities fought British expansion under the leader Tirot Sing in the war of 1829 to 1833.