Usoi Tripura is a southern dialect of Tripura/Kokborok,
which belongs to the Boro-Garo group of the
Tibeto-Burman language family, and is spoken mainly in the Chittagong Hill
Tracts of Bangladesh. In this paper, based on my own data, I have briefly
described the phonology of the Usoi Tripura dialect.
Thereafter, I have tried to compare Usoi Tripura forms with their corresponding
Proto-Boro-Garo (PBG) forms found in the seminal work
_ e
Comparative Phonology of the Boro-Garo Languages by U. V. Joseph and Robbins Burling. My comparative
work made it clear that Usoi Tripura is conservative
in that it still retains the three-way contrast of stop initials and two types
of liquids and tones, respectively, while it is innovative in that it has
already done away with final liquids and replaced three types of final stops
with glottal stops. Aside from these general tendencies, Usoi
Tripura shows some peculiar characteristics such as the absence of voiced velar
stops in native words and the voicing of PBG initial bilabial stops where their
finals are liquids or dental stops in particular. Exhaustive lists of
phonological correspondences between Usoi Tripura and
Proto-Boro-Garo are also provided.