ABSTRACT
This chapter will study the demography of wet-rice plains in traditional Assam (India) and in the slash-and-burn hills around, and will relate these observations to two sets of linguistic data that provide an interesting contrast: the Tani-speaking people of the eastern Himalayas and the Naga people on the other side of the Brahmaputra river, facing Burma. I will describe the extent to which the speed of language change is dependent upon a number of integrated factors, among them population density.
