Page:Provincial geographies of India (Volume 4).djvu/155

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
xiii]
LANGUAGES
139

the west, with good-natured contempt he calls kala (barbarians). Of many settlers, Indians from all parts of the Peninsula are most numerous, principally from Madras, Bengal, and Chittagong, but the Pathan and the Sikh also wander as far afield. Mahomedans number 417,290; more than half in Rangoon and the Akyab district. Of all Mahomedans, 59,729 are zerbadi, that is, of mixed Burmese and Indian origin. Ten years ago there were 386,679 Hindus, of whom over 100,000 were in Rangoon. Indians absorb much of the trade of the towns; and Chetti moneylenders are encroaching on the land. Many Indian labourers come annually for field work, returning after the harvest has been gathered.

Chinese. Chinese number 122,834, the population of this race having doubled in ten years. Probably it has increased substantially in the last decade. These settlers come from the coast ports and from Yünnan which borders on Upper Burma. Chinese are good citizens and mingle freely with the Burmese.

Europeans. The European population is scanty, amounting only to 12,790, inclusive of the garrison. To these should be added 11,107 Anglo-Indians.

(II) LANGUAGES

The languages of the Province are classified under the Tibeto-Chinese; Austro-Asiatic; and Malaya-Polynesian families. To the first belong the Tibeto-Burman sub-family, comprising Burmese, spoken by 8,317,842 with local variants such as Arakanese and Tavoyan; Chin (296,312); Kachin (170,144); and other dialects of which the Lolo group (165,548), spoken by some tribes on the north-eastern frontier is numerically the most important; and the Siamese-Chinese sub-family including Karen and Shan, each spoken by about a million people. The Austro-Asiatic family is represented by Môn-Hkmer languages, of which