Bishnupriya Manipuri – English Dictionary

Dr. Kali Prasad Sinha’s field work yielded 30,000 Bishnupriya Manipuri words (lexicons) thoroughly analysed and orderly organized in the form of a comprehensive dictionary. His manuscript was ready way back in 1974 but not published. He picked out around 10,000 non-Sanskrit words of etymological interest from his collected lexicon and compiled an etymological dictionary – An Etymological Dictionary of Bishnupriya Manipuri. It was published in 1986 by Punthi Pustak, Calcutta. This work elevated the Bishnupriya Manipuri language, an endangered and minor language, to be next to only Bengali to have an etymological dictionary. An Etymological Dictionary of Bengali by Dr. Sukumar Sen was published by Eastern Publisher, 1971. These three masterworks of Dr. Sinha – (1) Bishnupriya Manipuri: A Descriptive Sketch, (2) The Bishnupriya Manipuri Language and (3) An Etymological Dictionary of Bishnupriya Manipuri – are cited by the scholars working in the field of linguistics, especially of Indo-Aryan languages. Dr. Colin P. Masica also cited these three publications in his monumental work, The Indo-Aryan Languages – published by Cambridge University Press, UK, 1991. According to Masica, “… Bishnupriya Manipuri Language, language spoken in parts of Manipur, and in Cachar District (Assam), Tripura and Bangladesh (Sylhet) by early nineteenth century emigrants from Manipur related to but not a ‘dialect of Bengali or Assamese; though once regarded as (Linguistic Survey of India) Bengali-Meitei creole, retains pre-Bengali features, [Masica: IAL, pp 425.] Dr. Sinha also published several books and articles on grammar and linguistics in the Bishnupriya Manipuri language for consumption of the interested readers in the speech community. This led the intelligentsia in the community to engage themselves in debates, discussion and brainstorming on the language issue. Holistically, work of Dr. Sinha on the Bishnupriya Manipuri language and linguistics have installed a strong and rigid pedestal for the language to stand on. Amidst legal rows, the community could establish its ethnic identity as Bishnupriya Manipuri mainly based on his academic works.