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Assamese or Asamiya (অসমীয়া Ôxômiya) is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language used mainly in thestate of Assam, where it is an official language. The easternmost of the Indo-Aryan languages, it is spoken by over 13 million native speakers, and serves as a lingua franca in the region. It is also spoken in parts of Arunachal Pradesh and othernortheast Indian states. Nagamese, an Assamese-based Creole language is widely used in Nagalandand parts of Assam. Nefamese is an Assamese-based pidgin used in Arunachal Pradesh. Small pockets of Assamese speakers can be found inBangladesh. 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 A.D from the Magadhi Prakrit, which developed from a dialect or group of dialects that were close to, but different from, Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Its sister languages include Bengali, Odia, Maithili, Chittagonian, Sylheti (Cilôţi), Angikaand Bihari languages. It is written in the Assamese script, an abugida system, from left to right, with a large number of typographic ligatures.

The word Assamese is an English formation built on the same principle as Sinhalese or Japanese etc. It is based on the English word Assam by which the tract consisting of the Brahmaputra Valley and its adjoining areas are known. The people call their state Ôxôm and their language Ôxômiya.

Assamese originated in Old Indo-Aryan dialects, though the exact nature of its origin and growth in not clear yet. It is generally believed that Assamese (Assam) and the Kamatapuri lects (North Bengal and Assam) derive from the Kamarupa dialect of Eastern Magadhi Prakrit and Apabhramsa, by keeping to the north of the Ganges; though some authors contest a close connection of Assamese with Magadhi Prakrit. The Indo-Aryan language in Kamarupa had differentiated by the 7th-century, before it did in Bengal or Orissa. These changes were likely due to non-Indo-Aryan speakers adopting the language. The evidence of this language (Kamarupi Prakrit) is found in the Prakritisms of the Kamarupa inscriptions. A fully distinguished literary form (poetry) appeared in the fourteenth century in the courts of the Kamata kingdom; in the same century, Madhav Kandali translated the Ramayana into the Assamese (Saptakanda Ramayana) in the eastern court of a Kachari king. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, songs (borgeets), dramas (ankiya nat) and the first prose writings (by Bhattadeva) were composed. The literary language, based on the western dialects of Assam moved to the court of the Ahom kingdom in the seventeenth century, where it became the state language. Different kinds of prose developed. According to Goswami (2003), this included “the colloquial prose of religious biographies, the archaic prose of magical charms, the conventional prose of utilitarian literature on medicine, astrology, arithmetic, dance and music, and above all the standardized prose of the Buranjis. The literary language, having become infused with the eastern idiom, became the standard literary form in the nineteenth century, when the British adopted it for state purposes. As the political and commercial center shifted to Guwahati after the mid-twentieth century, the literary form moved away from the eastern variety to take its current form.

Though early compositions in completely differentiated Assamese varieties exist from the fourteenth century, the earliest relics of the language can be found in palaeographic records of the Kamarupa Kingdom from the fifth century to the twelfth century. Assamese linguistic features have been discovered in the ninth-century Buddhist verses called Charyapada, coming from the end of the Apabhramsa period and discovered in 1907 in Nepal. Early compositions matured in the fourteenth century, during the reign of the Kamata king Durlabhnarayana of the Khen dynasty, when Madhav Kandali composed the Saptakanda Ramayana. Since the time of the Charyapada, Assamese has been influenced by the languages belonging to the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families in Northeast India.