Garo, also referred to by its endonym A·chikku, is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the Northeast Indian states of Meghalaya, Assam, and Tripura.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the American Baptist missionaries put the north-eastern dialect of Garo called A•we into writing, initially using the Bengali script.

Today, a variant of the dialect can be heard among the speakers of Tura, a small town in the west-central part of Garo Hills, which is actually an Am•beng-speaking region.

The political headquarters was established in Tura, after Garo Hills came under the complete control of the British Government in 1873.

Tura also became the educational hub of Garo Hills, and in time, a de facto standard developed from the north-eastern dialect (A•we) which gradually became associated with the town and the educated Garo speech everywhere ever since.

The Latin-based Garo alphabet used today consists of 20 letters and a raised dot called "raka" (a symbol representing the glottal stop [ʔ]).

The letters "f", "q", "v", "x", "y", and "z" are not considered to be part of the alphabet and appear only in borrowed words.

Bengali and Assamese had been the mediums of instruction in educational institutions until 1924, and they have played a great role in the evolution of the modern Garo as we know it today.

Recently there has also been a proliferation of English words entering the everyday Garo speech, owing to media and the preference of English-medium schools over those conducted in the vernacular.

The script is used to some extent in the village of Bhabanipur in northwestern Bangladesh, and is also known as A•chik Garo Tokbirim.

The Garo language comprises dialects such as A·we, Am·beng/A·beng, Matchi, Dual, Chisak, Ganching, and a few others.

Although the de facto written and spoken standard grew out of A·we, they are not one and the same; there is marked variation in the intonation and the use of vocabulary between the two.

It would be proper, therefore, to make a distinction between Standard A·we (spoken mainly in Tura) and Traditional A·we (still heard among the speakers in the north-eastern region of Garo Hills).

Mikka - Rain Garo has been given the status of an associate official language (the main official being English) in the five Garo Hills districts of Meghalaya under the Meghalaya State Language Act, 2005.

The language is also used as the medium of instruction at the elementary stage in Government-run schools in the Garo Hills.

In schools where English is the sole medium, Garo is taught only as a subject, as Modern Indian Language (M.I.L.).

There has been an increase in the production of learning materials such as dictionaries, grammar and other text books, translated materials, newspapers, magazines and journals, novels, collection of short stories, folklores and myths, scholarly materials, and many important religious publications such as the Garo bible and the Garo hymnal.

Kol grik Garo is a SOV language, which means that the verbs will usually be placed at the end of a sentence.

Example usages can be "Anga Turaoni Shillong-ona re•angaha", which means "I traveled from Tura to Shillong".

Garo also considers clusivity and has two separate first-person plural pronouns for both "inclusive we" and "exclusive we".

However, Garo does not consider grammatical gender, and has one pronoun for third person singular.

Note that in written Garo, "Bia" is often replaced with "Ua", which literally means "That" in English.

While almost all other languages in the Bodo–Garo sub-family contrast between low and high tones, Garo is one of the sole exceptions.