Puroik language

The Puroik language, also called Sulung, is a language spoken by the Puroik people of Arunachal Pradesh in India and of Lhünzê County, Tibet, in China. It is of uncertain affiliation.

Remsangpuia (2008:17) lists the following Puroik villages. The Puroik also live in Nyishi, Aka, and Miji areas.

According to the Ethnologue, Puroik is spoken in 53 villages along the Par River in Arunachal Pradesh.

The Puroik are located from the Upper Subansiri River drainage basin (西巴霞区) to the Tawang River drainage basin (Li 2005). Names include pɯh31 ɣut55 (autonym) and su55 loŋ33 (Bangni exonym). There are about 3,000 people as of 2002.

The Puroik language is traditionally assumed to be a Sino-Tibetan language of the Kho-Bwa group. However, the conventional classification of Kho-Bwa languages as Sino-Tibetan is being questioned, quite independently of the additional issue whether Puroik belongs to Kho-Bwa in the first place. In the context of Sino-Tibetan, Puroik is highly divergent, and it is not entirely certain it should be classified as such at all. Blench (2011) considers Puroik a language isolate. There is some mutual intelligibility with Bugun, and Burling (2003) grouped it with Bugun and Sherdukpen, and possibly with Lish and Sartang. James A. Matisoff (2009) considers Puroik to be a Tibeto-Burman language.

Besides their own language, the Puroik also use Nishi, Hindi, and Assamese. Literacy is very low, at about 2%. Those who are literate use either the Bengali script, Devanagari or the Latin alphabet to write Puroik.