Sadri, also known as Nagpuri, is an eastern Indo-Aryan language historically associated with the Chota Nagpur plateau region of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Bihar, where it functions as a mother tongue of the Sadan community and as a lingua franca among several Dravidian and Austroasiatic tribal groups such as the Kurukh, Kharia, and Munda. A lesser-studied variety of this language, locally termed “Baganiya bhasa”, is spoken by the tea-garden community of Assam, whose ancestors were brought from the Chota Nagpur belt as indentured labourers during the British colonial period. Over more than a century of geographical separation and sustained contact with Assamese, this variety has developed distinctive phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics that distinguish it from the Sadri/Nagpuri spoken in its region of origin. This paper presents a typological and morphological description of Assam's Sadri, drawing on documented grammatical sources on Nagpuri/Sadri together with illustrative elicited data collected from the Monabari Tea Estate and Dalongguri village tea-community area of Biswanath District, Assam. The study examines the language's agglutinative morphology, its tense-mood-person marking system, its number and gender marking strategies, and its elaborate honorific pronominal paradigm, and situates these features within the broader typological profile of eastern Indo-Aryan languages. The findings indicate that, while Assam's Sadri largely preserves the core agglutinative-cum-fusional morphological architecture of Nagpuri, it shows incipient lexical and pragmatic convergence with Assamese, manifested in code-switching, code-mixing, and emergent vocabulary among younger speakers. The paper argues that Assam's Sadri represents a contact-influenced diaspora variety worthy of independent typological documentation, and proposes a fuller programme of field-based research, including structured interviews and questionnaires, to establish the extent of its divergence from Sadri varieties spoken in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Odisha, and West Bengal.

Keywords: Assam's Sadri, Nagpuri, lingua franca, language typology, morphology, tea-garden community, language contact