Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistics

Department of Linguistics

University of Kashmir

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

Occurrence of indefinite nouns in Saudi Northern dialect of Arabic (SNDA) is often characterized by the use of a preposition-like element (PLE). The complementary distribution of the PLE and the definite article al- “the” might be assumed as an evidence for the indefinite nature of the element. However, the restricted distribution of the PLE compared to the indefinite article where the PLE only appears in a position c-commanded by the verb in sentences with two nouns one of each is definite with which the PEL clitic agrees makes me argue that this element is a head of some sort; this head selects indefinite nouns. This paper investigates this specific syntactic phenomenon which has never been investigated in this dialect before and has never been manifested or reported in any of the Arabic dialects.

for an international NGO I have noticed that applicants often ask for funds for collecting data and for documentation, for running classes and creating handbooks and for travelling to hold interviews with the remaining speakers and for also purchasing technological inputs. Such application for grants generally tend to focus on the documentation of the languages which are deemed endangered and where there is a fear that with the death of the last speaker of the community the language will die. One must however examine the socio political, economic reasons why a community has shifted away from habitual use of its ethnic language. Understanding these reasons will help in the running of appropriate revitalisation programmes. In this study I will focus on the diasporic Sindhi Hindu community in a number of research sites who have shifted away from the dominant use of their ethnic language. We will describe and examine the extensive work of a Sindhi language activist and argue that the many strategies to revitalise a language must first focus on determining the reasons for such a shift. In short, depending on the reasons for language shift the focus of a revitalisation strategy must be aligned with such reasons. A revitalisation programme taking a bottom up approach that is, determining the cause of the shift will be more fruitful compared to one that merely focusses on documenting a language.

The paper presents a morphological sketch of Sanenyo (ISO 639-3 crv) /sənɛːɲə/ (also called Chaura, or Tutet), spoken by the Chaura community of the Chaura island and is a part of the Nicobarese branch of the Austroasiatic language family and the language status is 6b (Threatened)1. Various characteristics like tense, number and gender agreement, phrasal structures, case, number system etc. are discussed. All the data mentioned are collected first hand from the fieldwork done in Port Blair and Teressa islands with the help of the native speakers. The findings are part of the ongoing project conducted by Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore under the Scheme for the Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (SPPEL). No prior morphological study of the language has been done yet and hence this paper is the first attempt to bring out the morphological sketch of the language.

India. India is a multilingual country and multilingualism is not a rare phenomenon but a reality world across. India is rich in linguistic diversity and it is an asset rather liability. Unfortunately many Indian languages are on the verge of extinction due to dominance of main stream languages. The paper presents an overview of different language policies and their impact on Indian school education system. Even though it is constitutional obligation of India that every state must impart primary education in mother tongue (MT) and also provide for the appointment of a 'Special Officer' for linguistic minorities (Article 350 B), still this dream is yet to be realised. The recent National Education Policy (NEP 2020) similar to the earlier ones has also emphasised upon mother tongue, local language or regional language as the medium of instruction at least till Grade 5, but preferably till Grade 8 and beyond. As per the policy document a regional language or mother-tongue, English and/or Hindi and another Indian language are to be used for educational purpose. In the present scenario MT education is being imparted only through a limited number of major standardized languages. Children of marginalised languages are being deprived because of the dominance of main stream languages. This paper deliberates upon challenges and opportunities in Indian school education system from multilingual perspective. Exploration is based on the case studies from schools and analysis of factual data on children education in India.

English is widely taught in every institute where education is imparted. It has become a global language because of a very large number of people making use of it. Even many Madrasas have been teaching English to their students because it is the need of the hour. But in spite of many efforts made by religious scholars, there are hundreds of Madrasas where English is still not included as a subject in their curriculum. Students of such Madrasas do not learn English language. In such cases, students after spending 8 to 10 years have difficulties in getting jobs anywhere because English language skills have become mandatory for most of the jobs nowadays. So, to remove this problem of Madrasa students, Maulana Badruddin Ajmal Qasmi started a two-year diploma course in English language and literature (DELL) at an Islamic seminary, Markazul Ma’arif, New Delhi in 1994. The basic objective of this DELL is to introduce Madrasa students to modern subjects such as English.

Interrupting behaviours, also known as turn-taking behaviours, exhibited by two male adults-with-stuttering disorder (AWS) as Conversational Partners (CPs) were invoked in response to the stuttered speech of another male AWS as their Speaker during face-to-face conversations in Hindi. The paper has discussed the preliminary findings based on two separate conversational speech samples that were drawn from the cohort of forty-four Hindi conversational speech samples collected during the doctoral studies for a larger investigation. The relevance of investigating impaired conversations in Hindi stemmed from the realization that understanding the actual reasons for communication breakdown in AWS would eventually help the speech clinicians in highlighting specific circumstances to AWS clients that invoke their fluent-speaking listeners to exhibit such behaviours during daily conversations, and thus, incorporating therapeutic methods to reduce the negative emotional content of AWS while encountering such behaviours during speaking situations.

Speech plays a focal role in the process of communication, as people show social binding through language only. It is merely by means of speech that complicated ideas are conveyed from person to person. However, the role of speech is not only to pass information among people, but also to create interactional relations between them. And this interactional relation is supposed to be polite, as etiquette of the absolute majority of cultures advocate the same belief. The polite factor in conversation enables the participants of communication to feel at ease, to enjoy conversations and social interactions in general. Through prescribed rules of etiquette, people are able to converse effectively. Moreover, human-beings can continue living in peace together if fundamental elements of politeness are observed. Politeness is the application of good etiquette. Politeness expressions are culture specific, i.e., expressions considered polite in one culture can be indecorous or simply unacceptable in another culture. The present paper is an attempt to provide the quantitative analysis of politeness expressions found among the speakers of Kashmiri language with respect to age, gender and educational status.

Pashto spoken by the majority of people in Afghanistan and Khyber Pakhtun khwa province of Pakistan. It is also spoken as the first language by the minority group of people in Kashmir. This paper aims to examine the consonant clustering of Pashto language spoken in Kashmir in the context of sonority hierarchy. Languages of the world exhibit different sequencing of consonants allowed by the sonority sequencing constraint. The linear order of segments in a language is usually influenced by different phonotactic restrictions which only allows the optimal order of consonant sequences. These arrangements of consonant clusters within syllables are subjected to occur in sequences adjacent to each-other by their sonority value. The sounds which are most sonorous occur at the peaks while as the less sonorous sounds occur at the edges within the syllables (Clements, 1990, Hooper, 1976, Kiparsky, 1979). This pattern is generally followed by most of the languages of the world. The sonority order of segments is constrained in languages, what are the different constraints which put these restrictions on Pashto consonant clusters? The phonotactic constraints of these clusters are subjected to manner, place and voice features of the sound segments in Pashto language which determines the order of consonant sequences in the language. This paper reveals different clustering order of consonants at the initial position of Pashto syllables constrained by the sonority value and how the sonority of different segments effect the linear order of sound sequencing in Pashto language.

The present paper aims to examine the claimed language proficiency of Burushos in terms of four language skills i.e. understanding, speaking, reading and writing for their mother tongue Burushaski and other languages known them. The main purpose to obtain the information is to ascertain the language vitality for Burushaski and other languages comprising their linguistic repertoire.

Mewari is the language of Mewar region of Rajasthan. This region includes four districts, which are, Chittorgarh, Rajsamand, Bhilwara and Udaipur, and other than that, a few nearby parts of Madhya Pradesh. Among these, pure Mewari is spoken in Chittorgarh. Although the total population is as high as 17, 410, 568 (according to Census 2011), there is a rapid change in the attitude of its speakers, especially within the younger generation. One of the main reason observed is the dominance of Hindi, in terms of economic status, education qualification and home location (whether rural or urban). Moreover, Mewari does not have a script. As a result of which, although rich in folklores, these are nowhere documented. One reason for this is seen as unawareness of its speaker. According to a native speaker of Mewari, residing in Chittorgarh, the earlier edition of RBSE textbooks of EVS had a chapter on the Mewari language in Class 3, but the recent edition has removed this chapter. Thus, for the younger generation, they do not get to see any significant written work related to their language; as they see in other languages of their immediate environment, like Hindi and English. This paper studies the reason behind this change in attitude of the speakers, based on some observations and conversations with local people of Chittorgarh.

Natural Language Processing is the process of extracting grammatical information of a word on the basis of morphemes it contains. It is the process of identification, analysis and description of the given language’s morphemes and other linguistic units such as root words, stems etc. Morphological analyzer is a tool which identifies and analyzes the internal structure of given word and also extracts the morphological and grammatical information associated with it. The present work includes the study of tense and agreement of Kashmiri verbs using Paradigm based approach taking only Intransitives into consideration. The verbs in Kashmiri get inflected for tense (present, past, future), number (singular, plural), gender (Masculine, feminine) etc.. This work is the first of its kind and will serve as an important pre- processing tool for developing a machine translation system for Kashmiri.

The Biblical story of ‘Shibboleth’ in The Book of Judges has been repeated over the centuries in cultures all around the world in the context of language tests which play a role in the exclusion and inclusion of people in various social groups. In this story, the way the word shibboleth was pronounced was used to detect a ‘friend’ from ‘foe’, resulting in the deaths of many defeated troops trying to ‘pass’ as friendly non-combatants. This phenomenon is part of the universal use of language tests for distinguishing social groups. Though the modern language tests are supported and refined by considerable technical sophistication, the very formal and scientific character of language tests can be useful in masking their social purpose of inclusion and exclusion. The paper presents a brief overview of language testing regimes across various nation states and their impact on immigration and vulnerable immigrant groups.

Paddari language belongs to western Pahari sub-group of Indo- Aryan language family. It is primarily spoken in Padder area of District Kishtiwar of Jammu region. As per the census of 2011 there are approximately 21,550 speakers of Paddari. The language has been enlisted in the endangered language list of UNESCO. In an attempt to document the language a detailed description of grammatical cases in Paddari language is given in this paper.

This paper provides a detailed account of the tense and aspect features marked on the verbs of the Tibeto-Burman language known as Mech [metʃ]. The language is mood-prominent with a primary distinction between realis and irrealis. Mech also has a rich aspectual system. In addition to tense and aspect, the paper describes the morphology of verbs according to Vendler’s Aktionsart and the various situation types found in the language.

Scripts of Major Indian languages originated from the Brāhmī script. Letters are the basic rendering unit of Indian language scripts. The scripts today are encoded in electronic format using UNICODE standards. Unicode has a catalog of millions of characters. However, Indic Script such as Kannada has around 16 vowels and 36 consonants listed in the Unicode chart. In addition to this, letters are also the combinations of these vowels and consonants like CV, CCV, CCCV, etc. Along with this adding various signs like Anuswara, Visarga, Chandrabindu, Nukta and Avagraha with these combinations of vowels and consonants multiplies the complexity of finding the boundary of a single letter. Thus it can be claimed that letters in Indic scripts are multi-byte character sets which takes the combinations of vowels, consonants and various signs in all shapes and sizes. This paper presents an overview of the algorithm for text processing which can be adopted to process the Indic scripts in the context of multi-byte character sets using Kannada Script as a case study.

In multilingual communities, people have a choice of code. They may decide to switch from one code to other or to mix codes even within very short utterances. Code switching and code mixing are the common phenomenon observed in the multilingual communities. The alternate use of two or more languages in the same utterance or conversation is called code switching. In Kashmir more than one language is spoken. Kashmiri is the mother tongue, Urdu and English function as second language. Code switching and code mixing are the common phenomena observed. Bilinguals have been tested for the ability to understand and express themselves both verbally and in writing. (Grosjean; 1982). Code switching is not just limited to speaking but also has been seen in the text based communication. Text based communication comes under the realms of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Computer Mediated Communication is the communication that takes place between human beings through the instrumentality of computers. (Herrings, 1996).Text based communication has seen a very fast growth in last few years with social networking sites such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram etc. playing the role of catalyst. The present paper aims to study code switching and code mixing in the computer mediated communication among Kashmiri multilinguals. The data is collected from natives of Kashmiri with urdu and English as second language from different social media platforms such as Facebook, instagram, twitter, WhatsApp. The data is analyzed taking into consideration Malik’s (1994) reasons for code-switching in exploring the communicating patterns of Kashmiri multilinguals in CMC. The study revealed that the lack of facility is the main reason for code switching among Kashmiri multilinguals.