Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistics

Department of Linguistics

University of Kashmir

Print ISSN: 0974-3421 Online ISSN: 0974-3421

Religion is differentially constructed on the electronic domain by exploiting different linguistic strategies. The networked domain is of vital importance, frequented by an approximate 3.1 billion users worldwide (statistical proof from the Irish web-domain of Statista and the American web-domain of Internetlivestats). So the different religious organizations (which could have political associations too) have designed specific domains with dedicated web-interfaces to reach out to the connected masses. Specific e-resources like video recordings, blogs, tweets, electronic versions of articles, messages, animated content are created to propagate certain ideologies and objectives. It also obligates followers to believe in a certain set of codes. My work has explored such domains related to Hinduism. Employing theories of the language of religion as well as theories of the language of media, the paper portrays how polarizations exist in the virtual domain, manifested through the use of language. The analyses of language, utilized by the ideological/religious organisations under study, uphold the theories of discourse analysis, like, Framing Theory, Ideological Square, and Language Game Theory etc. The paper, making the theories of discourse as the basis for analyses, attempts to sum up how the ideological/religious organisations under study utilise language to control public opinion.

Kohistani is a Dardic language spoken in the upper parts of the Swat and Panjkora valleys (Swat Kohistan and Dir Kohistan), in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Kohistani of Swat Kohistan has been already described by Grierson (1919) and Hallberg (1992) to a large extent but the Kohistani spoken in the valley of Kashmir is yet to be taken into consideration. The Kohistani is spoken in the valley in different areas of Kangan like Waniyarm Wangath, Mirpati Mamar and Ganivan of district Ganderbal (Jammu & Kashmir). The present paper is an attempt to discuss noun morphology of Kohistani spoken in Kangan Tehsil of Jammu and Kashmir.

The valley of Kashmir being ethno-linguistically an inordinately complex region has accommodated different language speakers in its overall linguistic stratification. Apart from major languages like Kashmiri, Dogri, Ladakhi etc there are a multitude of minority languages like Sheikhgal, Burushaski, Shina, and Balti etc. There is a lesser known language which is so far unexplored and understudied language of Sheikhs/ Watals generally known as Sheikhgal. The community comprise a distinct identity in social ladder of the society and the popular profession associated with this community is scavenger or municipality jobs to clean roads. They address their language as [Opedigal] and [Phiri kathI]. It has speakers in all the main regions of Kashmir. In Srinagar they are concentrated in the areas like Parimpora, Nowhatta, Dargah, Natipora, Hawal etc. They are also found in Sopore (Baramulla), Lolaab, Lassipora (Pulwama), Kanthpora, Kulgam, Haihama, Magam, Handwara, Tarathpora (Kupwara). The linguistic repertoire of the people of the Sheikhgal speaking region mainly comprises of languages like Sheikhgal, Kashmiri and Urdu. The objective of this paper is to study the patterns of language use with special reference to Sheikhgal; 1. Across different domains 2. Across interlocutors in different domains 3. Across formal and informal contexts

The conceptual metaphor theory locates metaphor in head bust there are some scholars (Quinn 1991; Gibbs 1999) who argue that the ontological constructs on our mental maps cannot be ignored and may occur prior to metaphor in influencing concept formation. Recent works suggest that some primary conceptual metaphors may be so basic to human experience that they occur in all or most cultural context (Grady 1999) but in contrast complex metaphors are “built out of primary metaphors plus forms of commonplace knowledge: cultural models, folk theories, or simply knowledge or beliefs that are widely accepted in culture” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:60). In this article I will try to peep into the cultural grounding of the metaphors with the help of few examples of Hindi.

The Kashmiri short story has some peculiarities which are unique to it. It took birth in the violent context of the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947. Compared to other genres, the Kashmiri short story is the ace reflection of the rich cultural and social life of Kashmir. It depicts the socio-cultural landscape of the Kashmiri ethnicity which has been looking upon itself as a distinct identity. It is also reflective of the ethnic and cultural consciousness of Kashmiris as a community. In this paper an attempt has been made to analyse the Kashmiri short story through the four broad ethno-nationalistic parameters of mythology, history, contemporary conflict, distinct ethnic consciousness and the collective behavioural patterns of the Kashmiri community.

Every year, thousands of engineering students appear for IIT JEE, CET and other competitive exams to get admission in various Engineering institutes. Most of these entrance exams have been conducted in both English and Hindi languages. As a result, in these institutes, we have a large number of students who are very competent in Engineering subjects, but lack proficiency in Basic English. These students mostly belong to states like Rajasthan and Utter Pradesh where English is not a compulsory subject at the secondary level and they have been groomed and taught in vernacular languages1. Hence, the students who are otherwise very good in the science subjects face language challenges and difficulties. This paper tries to analyze some of those language challenges faced by the premier institutes like IITs and how these institutes respond to these language challenges with innovations.

Magahi is one of the Indo-Aryan languages spoken predominantly in Bihar. Though the language is considered as a dialect of Hindi on the basis of the lexical similarities, it differs from Hindi on a large scale, structurally. The language demonstrates some of the distinctive linguistic features which are not widespread in Indo-Aryan languages e.g., the three -way number distinction, the constraint on plural system, the agreement in honorific, negation system, the presence of multiple determiner, over bound definite determiner with proper noun etc. Noun in Magahi usually accompanies with a particle that can be called a discourse particle because of its nature of occurrence in the discourse only. The particle does not occur with the noun outside the discourse. The ‘elsewhere’ form of the discourse particle is ‘-wA’ which was considered to have no semantics earlier. There are three forms of the particle which are in complementary distribution and are phonologically conditioned. The variant forms of the particle are ‘-wA’, ‘-A’ and ‘-yA’. The particle in all its forms functions as definite marker or specificity marker. No work has been done to value the kind of function this particle performs in the language’s structure. This paper is an attempt to describe the use of the particle ‘-wA’ and its various linguistic and social implications and its speech community.

Address terms are the starting elements of any conversation and can provide very valuable sociolinguistic information about interlocutors, their relationship and their circumstances. For the purpose of acquiring such sociolinguistic information there have been extensive studies of address terms in different languages in the past few decades. In line with those studies this paper focuses on identifying different types of addressing terms that Gojri interlocutors may use in different contexts. The data for the study was collected from native speakers of the Gojri language through a questionnaire and observation. Personal names, general and occupation titles, kinship related terms, , honorifics, personal pronouns, etc were found to be the possible categories for Gojri addressers’ choice. The study also reveals that the Gojri speakers need to be sociolinguistically competent enough to use proper address terms in proper contexts keeping in view the various social attributes like the age, social status, etc. of the addressee.

Dhimal is one of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Dhimals residing originally in the far-eastern Tarai region (i.e., Jhapa, Morang and Sunsari districts) of Nepal. This language is also spoken by a small number of people, known as Mallik, in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India. The relative clauses are formed in two ways. The first and widely used strategy is to put the verb of the relative clause in a participial/nominalized form. The participial clauses in Dhimal, as in many other languages, are embedded in the main clause through the process of nominalization. The main strategy employed in Dhimal to recover the case role of the relativized noun is generally referred to as gap strategy. Most of the syntactic arguments such as subject, direct object, indirect object, locative instrumental and comitative NPs may be relativized in Dhimal.

One of the most important social and daily customs in any human society is greeting. Different spoken expressions of greeting are within the vernacular of any community and they have a high social position due to their importance in enhancing and promoting the relations between the society members. Variety of greeting expressions, both verbal as well as non-verbal are found in the speech of Kashmiri speakers. These verbal and non-verbal greeting expressions constitute Kashmiri greeting ritual (KGR). The present paper is an endeavor to study the detailed usage of greeting expressions found among Kashmiri speakers with main focus on the cross-gender differences, as no such detailed study has been undertaken so far. The picture presented here is not an exhaustive study. There are still various ramifications of the subject that need to be handled with sharper and more sophisticated tools. Nevertheless, this sociolinguistic study may give some insight into the nature of the socio-psychological organization of our community, its rights and obligations, duties and privileges, attitude and beliefs. A strong 'verbal lubricant' in its own right, a greeting provides a bridge between individuals.

The categorizations of causal verbs in Indo-Aryan languages are majorly based on two morphemes, i.e., -- and --. Therefore, studies have been more focused towards the syntactic and semantic issues related with two forms of causative verbs than rethinking about the ways of classifications. However, besides these two morphemes, this work includes the significance of passives as well to propose a classification1 on the basis of morphological form and syntactic-semantic function of Bāngarū causative verbs. Further, the paper provides some interesting evidences of dual functioning, viz., as transitivizer and causativizer, of both the morphemes. It also suggests that the possibility of syntactic doubling on indirect or direct object positions like Punjabi and Sanskrit respectively has no room in Bāngarū.

The use of the concept of ideology in a formal sense is relatively new in sociolinguistics or in even in linguistics in general. The first comprehensive attempt to analyse its utility in this field was done in the 1990s, even though, in an implicit sense, it was being used by sociolinguists even before it was formally introduced as a part of this field. Language ideology is currently viewed both as a field of enquiry, where the researchers aim to unravel the language related ideologies of an individual or a community, and as a influencing factor or a mediating link which affects language behaviours and patterns. Because of the palpable importance, extensive utility and wide applicability, it is adopted by scholars working in various areas of sociolinguistics and it is currently one of the most widely utilised concepts in sociolinguistic researches. In this paper, a brief survey of its use in some select fields of enquiry in sociolinguistics is presented followed by some examples of its use in some specific cases. Language Ideology as a tool and subject matter of enquiry in sociolinguistic researches

The role of Media is conveyed on its agentive role through which symbolic communication influences human thought, culture and language. In its process of dissemination of information, communications systems operate through two ways; one is the way by which they promote changes by information, motivation, and guidance to its viewers at individual level. The other is the socially mediated way through which media influences connection between the viewers to social networks and social settings. This communication at mass level provides natural speedy and continuous regulation, for desired change. Media- based influences on social, psychological and linguistic domains can be analyzed by the diffusion of new styles of behaviour in terms of the factors governing their acquisition and adoption and the social networks through which they spread and are supported. Media being the powerful instrument in constructing different aspects of mental and social behaviour of the audiences, its-rooted impact on various linguistic domains will not be spared. Minority language media is one of the central media-based initiations which influence the linguistic domains of the society. The present paper tries to find out the media-language valorization relationship and its impact on language planning for indigenous languages of J & K State. The present paper also tries to ascertain whether media exhibits institutional support for maintaining and promoting indigenous language(s) in the context of linguistic diversity in the valley.

This article has examined the inflectional affixes in Tsum in areal-typological context of Tibetan languages spoken in the Himalayan region. Tsum nouns inflect for the biological gender, number, classifier, classifier and emphatic marker, definiteness and case. As expected in Tibetan languages, a number of nouns end in -po and -mo to mark the biological gender. In addition to the numeral classifier -po, Tsum also possesses the numeral classifier plus the emphatic marker -kar attaching to the numeral. The plural marker is added to the last element of the noun phrase, rather than to the head nouns. Tsum shares all the case forms with Written Tibetan. These case forms are also shared by a number of immediate and distant Tibetan neighbours of Tsum.

Besides the scenic beauty, Kashmir valley also possesses a rich cultural heritage. The diversity of Kashmir Culture owes to a wide array of influences from different religious currents and civilizations. As such Kashmiri language has a rich share of cultural lexicon covering various dimensions of Kashmiri culture. The present paper is an attempt to look into the culinary terminology of Kashmiri.

It will be a nice learning experience for the Bangla language learners if an on-line Bangla education system is supported with a Digital Bangla Pronunciation Dictionary (DBPD), which may be accessed in classroom and at home, as the case may be, as one of the most useful reference guides for learning standard and acceptable pronunciation of Bangla words. With direct utilization of the DBPD, the learners will learn how Bangla words should be pronounced in standard or acceptable mode. In the era of on-line education a digital resource of this kind has the potential to improve on the traditional methods of language teaching where learners get opportunities to learn standard or acceptable pronunciation with direct utilization of modern computer technology in an interactive fashion with indirect assistance of language teachers. Through activation of a dialogue-based interactive user interface, learners will know how words in Bangla are pronounced in acceptable manner when the orthography of words hardly matches with pronunciation. This dictionary will also provide opportunities to the learners to understand how variations in pronunciation of words are caused due to variations in part-of-speech and meanings of similar orthographic forms. Within on-line education, this dictionary can be highly useful for non-native and foreign learners as well as for the speakers of different Bangla dialects and regional varieties – because they will get good opportunities and exposure to learn pronunciation of words considered standard and acceptable. Further application of this dictionary may be visualized in speech recognition, digital lexicography, text-to-speech conversion, language description, and language planning. Keeping such applications in mind, in this paper, I have tried to present the strategies and methods we have adopted to develop a DBPD in Bangla as a part of the digitization process of Bangla language education system. Our strategies and methods can easily be adopted for any of the Indian languages for developing such a highly useful digital resource for the service of its people.

This paper focuses on the acquisition of peripheral and central vowel space in Hindi speaking children aged 2 to 5 years. The study assumes that the acoustic space is continuously being redefined and modified in order to achieve and maintain a certain perceptual contrast, and attempts to explore how acoustic space develops in children in the first few years of language development. The study presents a graphic representation of the acoustic space of three peripheral and three central vowels of Hindi. This study uses the first two formants of the vowels along with duration. The development of acoustic space in twenty-two Hindi speaking children from 2 to 5 years of age shows significant results which are presented in this paper.

Kashmiri shares most of the modal expressions with Hindi-Urdu but it has a modal expression ma: ‘lest’ which does not have an equivalent in Hindi-Urdu. Similarly, Kashmiri like other Indo-Aryan Languages combines Nominals and Verbs to form conjunct verbs and idioms. A limited set of verbs like a:s-/sapud- ‘be’, kar- ‘do’, di- ‘give’, yi- ‘come’ , ni- ‘take’ and lag- ‘apply’ are used in these constructions in Kashmiri. They are used in Hindi-Urdu as well in similar constructions. However, Kashmiri uses some other verbs like ‘tul- ‘pick up/take’, khas- ‘rise’, tra:v- ‘leave’, la:g- ‘wear/apply’ rat- ‘catch/hold’, vuch-‘ see’, ha:v- ‘show’, thav- ‘keep’ etc. in these constructions which do not have their counterparts in Hindi-Urdu. When translated literally in Hindi-Urdu, they result in deviations from the standard. In this paper, deviations in the use of Hindi-Urdu by the native speakers of Kashmiri are accounted with examples of the transfer of modal expression ma: and N+V expressions from Kashmiri into Hindi-Urdu. Some culture bound expressions cannot be translated.

Attempts to understand the relationship between language and the brain have a long history. Prior to the advent of functional imaging, the history of aphasiology has been the most important piece of evidence to show how language functions are represented in the human brain. Recently, a great deal of progress on brain-language research has been driven by advances in both linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. These distinct approaches, coupled with the use of in-vivo imaging procedures have prompted significant insights into the neural mechanisms that underlie language. Despite the fact that scientific inquiry into brain-language relationship has grown substantially to support the neurological basis of language, there is still much controversy with respect to its organization in the human brain. This paper, therefore, offers an overview of the current state of knowledge on topics related to the neural and functional representation of language based on findings from neuropsychological and latest neuroimaging studies. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this research for the nature of language representation and processing in the brain.