Western Cultural Boundary of Assam

The idea of being a speaker (and, increasingly, a reader and writer) of one language exclusively and associating that language with national or ethnic identity is a modern phenomenon. The hard boundaries that we now like to draw, of course, leave out dialects particularly numerous in areas like Assam. We address this difficulty by assuming that dialects are related exclusively to one or the other of the languages. The relationship between language and dialect is, however, more problematical than that.