[2] It is spoken in the South Garo Hills and West Khasi Hills districts of Meghalaya state in Northeast India, southern Kamrup district in Assam, and adjacent areas in Bangladesh.
[3] A dictionary with Atong–English and English-A.tong sections, as well as semantic word lists[4] was published in 2021, two years after the publication of an analysis of A.tong stories.
Atong's situation is most probably due to the influence of Standard Garo, a prestige language in the State of Meghalaya.
There is no current estimate of the number of speakers available; according to the Linguistic Survey of India, it was spoken by approximately 15,000 people in the 1920s.
Since the Atong are considered a subdivision of the Garos, they are not counted as a separate ethnic or linguistic community by the Indian government.
In India, the Atongs are considered to belong to the Garo Tribe,[10] however, they speak a distinct language,[10][5] which, however, has no official status of its own.
Garo has a standardised form of speech used in education, administration, the press and literature.
That table also presents how the phonemes are written in the Atong alphabet used for everyday writing by people who are not linguists.
Atong has six vowel qualities occurring in the native vocabulary as well as in loanwords: /i e a ə o u/.
In addition, there are four long vowels which are only found in loanwords from English and Indic languages.
These are usually pronounced longer than the indigenous vowels: /iː/ [iː ~ i], /eː/ [eː ~ e], /aː/ [aː ~ a] and /oː/ [oː ~ o].
There are words that are written with two adjacent vowel graphemes or letters, e.g. mai 'rice', askui 'star', and chokhoi 'fishing basket'.
[8] Atong has many loanwords from Assamese language, Bengali, Hindi and English.