Assamese people Assam" by Europeans till 1821, when the Ahom kingdom became part of the Burmese Empire. After Assam became part of British India, the newly constituted province came to be known by its new anglicised name Assam after its largest constituent, and the name "Assamese / Asamiya" came to be associated with the Assamese language which was erstwhile known as Kamrupi. According to Yasmin Saikia, "the group that now identifies as Tai–Ahom were historically seen as the Assamese people. However, the term ethnic Assamese is now associated by the Indian government at Delhi with the Assamese speaking Indo–Aryan, Tibeto-Burman and Austric
Assamese language literary language. In the past, it was the court language of the Ahom kingdom from the 17th century. Along with other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Assamese evolved at least before 7th century CE from the middle Indo-Aryan Magadhi Prakrit, which developed from dialects similar to, but in some ways more archaic than Vedic Sanskrit. Its sister languages include Koch Rajbongsi, Mymensinghiya, Sylheti, Hajong, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Nokhailla, Chittagonian, Rohingya, Chakma, Bengali, Maithili and Angika. It is written in the Assamese script, an abugida system, from left to right, with a large number of typographic ligatures. Assamese originated in Old Indo-Aryan dialects, though