Nepal Bhasa (also known as Newari) is a language spoken by Newar community in the Kathmandu Valley, as well as in other towns inhabitated by newar community Nepal. While in Kathmandu valley, it is widely spoken and understood, in other parts it is spoken within the community only. Also, outside Kathmandu valley, it has absorbed local dialects and hence sounds very different. It is one of the roughly five hundred Sino-Tibetan languages in the world, and belongs to the Tibeto-Burman branch of this family. It has the fourth-oldest literature of the Sino-Tibetan languages (the first, second and third being Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese respectively). The Newar are the indigenous ethnolinguistic group of Nepals Kathmandu valley. ... This article is about the city. ... Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, in number of speakers worldwide second only to Indo-European. ... The Tibeto-Burman linguistic subfamily of the proposed Sino-Tibetan language family is spoken in various central and south Asian countries: Myanmar (Burmese language), Tibet (Tibetan language), northern Thailand (Mong language), Nepal, Bhutan, India (Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and the Ladakh region of...

Nepal Bhasa is the most Indicized of the Tibeto-Burman languages, and has had so many centuries of contact with neighboring Indo-Iranian languages that it has even developed noun inflection, a trait typical of the Indo-European family but extremely rare in Sino-Tibetan. It has absorbed other features of grammar as well, such as verb tenses. These influences are outstanding examples of funamental traits of a language being passed on through language contact. Indo-Iranian languages (also called Aryan languages) are the eastern-most group of the living Indo-European languages. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ... Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. ...

External links

• Michael Noonan, Recent Language Contact in the Nepal Himalaya.