Vowels
Assamese has eight vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. Vowels can be oral or nasal. Nasalization makes a difference in word meaning. Vowels can also be short or long.

xs	Front	Central	Back
High	i	x xx	u
Mid-high	e		o
Low-mid	ε		x
Low	x	a

ε	as in bed
	as in bought
	as in father

In addition, Assamese has a wide variety of diphthongs and successions of vowels. .

Consonants
Assamese has twenty-one consonants, depending on the variety analyzed. The number of consonants is somewhat smaller than in other Indo-Aryan languages.

• There is a contrast between aspirated vs. unaspirated voiceless and voiced stops, e.g., p—p, t—t, k—k, b - b, d - d, g - g. Aspirated consonants are produced with a strong puff of air.
• Most consonants can be geminated (doubled).
• There are no retroflex consonants as in other Indo-Aryan languages.
• The voiceless velar fricative /x/ is atypical of Indo-Aryan languages. It resembles the last consonant in Loch.
• Consonant clusters occur in word-initial, medial, and final positions. Word-initial clusters are restricted to sequences of consonant + semivowel, word-final clusters are restricted to sequences of homorganic nasal + consonants. Homographic consonants share the same place of articulation, e.g., /m/ and /p/ -/b/ are bilabial, /n/ and /t/ - /d/ are dental.

..xx	.xx	Bilabial	Apico-dental	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Stops voiceless	unaspirated	p	t	xx	k	x
	aspirated	p	t	xx	k	x
Stops voiced	unaspirated	b	d	xx	g	x
	aspirated	b	d	x	g	x
Fricatives	voiceless	xx	xxx	s	x	h
	voiced		xx	z	x	x
Nasals	xx	m	x	n		x
Laterals	xx	......x	l	xx	...xx	x
Flap	x	x	r	x	x	x
Semi-vowels	.xx	w	.xxx	xx	.xx	x

Stress
Stress can fall on any syllable of a word. As a result, words that are otherwise identical, can have a different meaning depending on the position of stress.

Click here to listen to Indira Goswami, a prominent Assamese writer, read from her works in Assamese.

Assamese grammar is very much like that of other Indo-Aryan languages. Like all these languages, Assamese is agglutinative, i.e., it adds suffixes to roots to build words and to express grammatical relations.

Nouns and adjectives
Assamese nouns are marked for the following grammatical categories:

• number: singular and plural
• gender: masculine, feminine
• case: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, locative, All cases are marked by postpositions. Assamese has preserved the case-marking of agents of transitive verbs, but unlike other Indo-Aryan languages, Assamese marks transitive agents and some intransitive agents in all tenses.
• there is a strong system of classifiers which are different in the singular and plural
• there is a well-developed system of honorifics that cover formal and informal relationships in a variety of social situations.
• adjectives are not marked for gender

Verbs
Verbs agree with their subjects (in the active voice), or with their objects (in the passive voice) in person, number and gender. Verbs have the following grammatical categories:

• person: 1st, 2nd, 3rd
• number: singular and plural
• tense: present, past, future
• aspect: imperfective and perfective
• mood: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, conditional
• voice: active, passive
• negation is marked by a prefix added to the verb root.

Word order
The normal word order in Assamese is Subject - Object - Verb. Modifiers precede the nouns they modify. Indirect objects precede direct objects.

The basic vocabulary of Assamese is Sanskrit in origin, but over the years Assamese has borrowed words from Hindi, English, Bengali, and other neighboring languages.

Below are Assamese numerals 1-9 in Romanization..