Excerpt from A Dictionary in Assamese and EnglishUnfortunately an impression has prevailed that Assamese and Bengali are identical or nearly so. Hence all the Schools, Courts, and o¿icial business of every kind are conducted in Bengali. This has greatly retarded the cause of education and general progress among the masses. They have no inclination to abandon their own for a foreign dialect. The higher classes, seeing their own language ignored, strive to obtain a sufficient knowledge of Bengali to fill Government offices, but they never feel at home in the language. 1 n the family 'and social circle, nothing but the vernacular is spoken. Were Government now to abandon the country, Assamese would supersede all other dialects simply because it is the language of the masses.That eminent linguist Max Muller tells us, that there is hardly a language that in some sense may not be called a mixed language. No nation or Tribe was ever so completely isolated as not to ad mit a certain number of foreign words. Again, lr matters not how many words may be derived in common from another language, it does'not prove the identity of any -two dialects It is to the grammar that we must look, to decide their identity.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.