Search

Historical information shows that East Meghalaya is a late refuge land with settlement in several groups of Lyngngam, Pnar, Khasi and War. A diversity of mixed languages in the context of migrations and two sucessive lingua francas (Pnar and Standard Khasi since the British colonisation) is a prominent feature of this group but there are still more conservative varieties of War, Lyngngam and Pnar. Pnar still is the main spoken language and is closer to War and to Lyngngam than Khasi. Negations and pronominal systems in Pnar, War, Khasi and Lyngngam have distinct morphological isoglosses in Mon-Khmer and in Munda. After four centuries of Pnar Lingua Franca in Meghalaya, Khasi lexicon appears to be Pnaric (including its cardinal system). After centuries of Pnar Lingua Franca, Lyngngam and War have integrated different Pnar sub-lexicons in their lexicons but Lyngngam and War are not Pnaric in origin as shown by different isoglosses in Munda (especially Juang for Lyngngam and Sora for War) not shared by Pnaric. Pnaric and War show significative morphological differences but Lyngngam differs from Pnaric and War in even more important morphological and systemic features. More data and analyses are needed to set the branching of Pnaric, War and Lyngngam and the branching of this Pnaric-War-Lyngngam (PWL) group in the AA tree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I suggest that to uncover the construction of literary production-whereby the dominant group constructs its reality and its history-is to interrogate the 'pure' text of traditional literary criticism in the context of the entire historical moment. The nineteenth-century literary sphere in Bengal witnessed a period of struggle between the popular indigenous inheritance in poetry and the formulation of a new modern poetry after English poetic convention; this period of give and take is read here through a study of the fluctuating fortunes of the reputation of the premier poet of the eighteenth century, Bharatchandra Ray, whose inheritance was a mixed one among the new Bengali readership that was created in this period. Reading against the grain of conventional literary critical approaches, it should be possible to acknowledge the enabling element in certain aspects of both the English and Bengali literary conventions in the formulation of a modern literature, and here I shall place the common inheritance of the various languages as they came together to formulate the idea of the literary in the nineteenth century side by side. It is my argument that contentions between the major literary languages of India, including the classical and folk languages, nouveau urban and mixed languages, colonial and 'native' languages, played an instrumental role in the many negotiations between modernity and nation in early nineteenth-century Bengal. This essay will be as much about literary criticism and the construction of certain dominant tropes of modernity through literary practice as about the practice of literature itself, aiming to highlight and understand the suppressed lineages of languages within the central discourse of nineteenth-century poetics and nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the spread of English language across the globe, it cannot remain 'pure', permanent and safe in its structure. Changes are inevitable. Like most languages, English too has changed and incorporated new patterns of contact with other languages and the changing communication needs of the people. Code switching and code mixing are well-known traits in the speech pattern of an average bilingual in any human society the world over. As a multilingual and multicultural society, India is not an exception. Hinglish, a combination of Hindi and English, has become a new medium of communication among masses in India. It is an interesting medley of arbitrary words from Hindi and English, employed effortlessly and spontaneously in different domains. It is widely practiced in houses, offices, markets, playgrounds--almost everywhere. The resurgence of Hindi in the recent years is one of the prime movers of Hinglish in India and it has given a tremendous boost to its functional relevance in the present linguistic environment. Hindi no longer considers English as its arch rival. The equation has changed globally. English and Hindi have come closer and they get on perfectly, when they work in tandem. Now it is a winning mix. This blend becomes a new mantra in social acceptance, prestige, and success. It has a great cementing force that connects people and places equally with ease. The paper draws together the different threads of Hinglish, its origin, growth and traces various reasons that lead to its pervasiveness in India and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Application of recently developed rhythmic measures to passages of read speech in colloquial and formal Tamil revealed some significant differences between the two varieties, which are in diglossic distribution. Both were also distinguished from a set of control data from British English speakers reading an equivalent passage. The findings have implications for the usefulness of the rhythmic measures and also the temporal characteristics of Tamil. High levels of interspeaker variability affected the measures; in some cases differences within each group of five speakers exceeded those separating distinct languages, indicating that such measures may not be reliable indicators of typological status. Discrepancies between previous findings and remeasurements of the same data also show the measures to be sensitive to differences in measurement criteria, specifically the treatment of pauses. The results confirm that the differences between colloquial and formal Tamil encompass durational characteristics, which appear to be largely explicable from differences in their syllabic structure. Provisional comparison with other languages suggests that their rhythmic properties cannot easily be captured by reference to traditional rhythmic classes. This may explain previous confusion in the literature over Tamil's temporal characteristics, which have been variously described in terms of stress-timing, syllable-timing, and mora-timing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the vernacularization of the Dakhini language and its political implication between 1500 and 1800. Co-evolution of identity and language; Language competition in western India; Tension in languages between hybridization and identity.