Chakma language

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Chakma Changma Vaj
Spoken in:	Bangladesh and India
Region:	Chittagong Hill Tracts
Total speakers:	612,207 312,207 in Bangladesh (2000 WCD), 300,000 in India (1987).
Language family:	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Eastern Group Bengali-Assamese Chakma
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`sit`
ISO 639-3:	`ccp`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The Chakma language (Changma Vaj or Changma Khoda) is an Indo-European language spoken in southeastern Bangladesh and neighboring areas of India. Although the Chakma people originally belong to Sakya Clan of Magadha Kingdom (then Pataliputra, present Bihar-Nepal border) and spoke a language belonging to the Aryan-Tibeto-Burman family, some of them have been heavily influenced by speakers of neighboring Chittagonian, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language closely related to Bengali. Changma Vaj is written in its own script, known as Ojhopath.

[edit] Dialects

The Chakma dialects could be related to Sanskrit and broken Pali. The language could be understood by all the speakers of Chakma in Bangladesh, India & Burma.