Darai is a verb final language. Topics normally occur in the initial position. The dominant unmarked word order of the major constituents of the sentence is SOV. It is a nominative/ accusative language rather than an ergative/ absolutive language. It shows SOV, GN, AN, NREL, V AUX order. It is a suffixing language.
The following isolated sentence exemplifies unmarked word order, e.g.,
mi bat ki-t-m
1s rice eat-NPST-1s
S O V
'I eat rice.'
Darai is a head-marking language where the core arguments are obligatorily marked on the verb; possession is marked on the possessed. Like other South Asian languages, there is no preference in the order of nominal elements.
A typological survey of Darai shows that its phonology and the nominal morphology follow the patterns of other Indo-Aryan languages of South-Asia. But the inflectional morphology and the agreement patterns in the syntax distinguish Darai from other languages of the same family. It is amazing that the agreement pattern based on person hierarchy of Darai is not only different from Nepali and Hindi but also it is completely different from Bote, Kumal (Gautam 2000, Parajuli 2000), Danuwar (Bhandari 2001), Majhi languages which are the close sister languages of Darai. In terms of inflectional morphology and syntactic relations, Darai shares some features of Tibeto-Burman languages.
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