Whose Language is Urdu?

One important aspect of the socio-political location of Urdu is the culturally accepted relationship of its "sisterhood" with Hindi. Independent India has, however, seen this sisterhood re-interpreted as a conflation of religious and linguistic identity, by which Urdu in particular has come to be represented as the language of Muslims. In this paper, we present the findings of a field survey in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Mysore, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, which show that speakers of Urdu resist this identfication, and explicitly characterise both the language as well as their linguistic practices in terms of the shared and syncretic culture of India

Reduplication in Tibeto Burman Languages of South Asia

この論文は国立情報学研究所の学術雑誌公開支援事業により電子化されました

Le redoublement dans les langues d'Asie du Sud

Abbi Anvita. Le redoublement dans les langues d'Asie du Sud. In: Faits de langues, n°10, Septembre 1997. Les langues d'Asie du Sud. pp. 31-36

A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language: an ethnolinguistic study

On the brink of extinction, the Great Andamanese language, one of the oldest in the world, had been crying out for concerted effort for salvage and documentation. A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language. An Ethnolinguistic Study is the first-ever detailed and exhaustive account of Great Andamanese, a moribund language spoken on the Andamanese Islands belonging to India in the Bay of Bengal. This important documentation covers all major areas of the grammar of Great Andamanese and gives us a first detailed look at this unique language, which is on the verge of extinction. Of particular interest here is the discussion of the body division class markers which play an important role throughout much of the grammar and which are documented in this volume for the first time. This grammar gives us a glimpse, at the last possible moment, of the possible first language of the South East Asia. The arduous circumstances in which this vast body of information was collected were quite challenging in the world of language documentation.\ud \ud Perhaps most importantly, PGA is a unique language; there is strong linguistic and genetic evidence to suggest that the people of the Andaman Islands represent a distinct genetic group who populated the islands from the mainland tens of thousands of years ago. According to some geneticists, Andamanese are the survivors of the first migration out of Africa 70.000 years BP. The language is a fast-closing window on a very ancient form of cognition.\ud \ud This grammar is the result of a major language documentation project Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese (VOGA), which was undertaken from 2005 to 2009 in the Andaman Islands

In search of language contact between Jarawa and Aka-Bea: The languages of South Andaman

The paper brings forth a preliminary report on the comparative data available on the extinct language Aka-Bea (Man 1923) and the endangered language Jarawa spoken in the south and the central parts of the Andaman Islands. Speakers of Aka-Bea, a South Andaman language of the Great Andamanese family and the speakers of Jarawa, the language of a distinct language family (Abbi 2006, 2009, Blevins 2008) lived adjacent to each other, i.e. in the southern region of the Great Andaman Islands in the past. Both had been hunter-gatherers and never had any contact with each other (Portman 1899, 1990). The Jarawas have been known for living in isolation for thousands of years, coming in contact with the outside world only recently in 1998. It is, then surprising to discover traces of some language-contact in the past between the two communities. Not a large database, but a few examples of lexical similarities between Aka-Bea and Jarawa are investigated here. Words for comparison are selected from the Automated Similarity Judgment Programme-list ASJP (Holman et al. 2008, Brown et al. 2007, 2008, Wichmann 2010) as well as from the Loan Word Typology research (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009). Although we have data only for 100 items, we further compared the lexical items against the Swadesh list (1955) (see appendix 5). The result achieved exposes for the first time, the possibility of language contact between Aka-Bea and Jarawa in the past. We pose a very relevant question here: can enmities and rivalries induce changes in languages which can be ascribed to contact of a very special kind? We conclude by claiming that prototypical least borrowable lexical items can also be borrowed in a very specific context despite the absence of interactive communication between the two communities

The grammar of 'non-realization'

On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and un-related languages, in this article we argue that the linguistic phenomena usually referred to as the avertive, the frustrative and the apprehensional belong not to three but to five–semantically related, and yet distinct, grammatical categories, all of which involve different degrees of non-realization of the verb situation in the area of Tense-Aspect-Mood: apprehensional; avertive; frustrated initiation; frustrated completion; inconsequential. Our major goal here is to account for these grammatical categories in terms of an adequate model of linguistic categorization. For this purpose, we apply the notion of Intersective Gradience (introduced for the first time in the morphosyntactic domain in Aarts (2004, 2007) to the morphosemantic domain. Thus the present approach reconciles two major approaches to linguistic categorization: (i) the classical, Aristotelian approach and (ii) a more recent, gradience/fuzziness approach

The grammar of 'non-realization'

On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and un-related languages, in this article we argue that the linguistic phenomena usually referred to as the avertive, the frustrative and the apprehensional belong not to three but to five–semantically related, and yet distinct, grammatical categories, all of which involve different degrees of non-realization of the verb situation in the area of Tense-Aspect-Mood: apprehensional; avertive; frustrated initiation; frustrated completion; inconsequential. Our major goal here is to account for these grammatical categories in terms of an adequate model of linguistic categorization. For this purpose, we apply the notion of Intersective Gradience (introduced for the first time in the morphosyntactic domain in Aarts (2004, 2007) to the morphosemantic domain. Thus the present approach reconciles two major approaches to linguistic categorization: (i) the classical, Aristotelian approach and (ii) a more recent, gradience/fuzziness approach