LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 20:1 January 2020
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Phonological Features of Kisan Mother Tongue Spoken in
Odisha State

Dr.P. Perumalsamy

Abstract

Kisan, a mother tongue of Kisan tribesmen, included in the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes list, has been successively returned since 1961, is a Dravidian speech essentially spoken in Odisha state surrounded by the Indo-Aryan and Munda speech communities. They are primarily engaged in cultivation and also working as agricultural labourers. Among the Dravidian languages, its close cognate language is Kurukh/ Oraon. Thus it comes under North Dravidian group of languages/mother tongues.

Kisan mother tongue speakers are found overwhelmingly in the three districts of Odisha. Namely, Sundargarh, Sambalpur and Jharsuguda as per the 2001 Census. Out of the total 1,39,428 Kisan mother tongue speakers, 91,368 speakers speak Odia, 5899 speakers converse Hindi and 1857 speakers know English.

Grierson (1909) opines that the ancestors of Kisan tribesmen might have belonged to Karnataka (Carnatic) and later on migrated to Odisha and Bihar and settled there as Oraon and Maler respectively. This article records on some of the phonological features of Kisan mother tongue to know about its present structure. It discusses about various phonemes such as vowels and consonants found in the Kisan mother tongue along with their distribution in the word level. It also discusses about the allophonic variations found in the speech, phonemic contrast available in this mother tongue etc. apart from the vowel and consonant clusters and the syllabic structure.

Kisan is essentially a Dravidian speech earlier but influenced by other speeches belonging to various families surrounded by them at present in Odisha. As a consequence of it, the phonological system of Kisan has undergone a lot of changes from the earlier one i.e. Dravidian feature. Since it is a preliminary research only and mainly focusing on the phonological structure of the speech, no comparative study with the neighbouring languages or other north Dravidian languages are made. However, such studies in future will highlight how much influence is noticed on this mother tongue by other speeches.

Keywords: Kisan Mother Tongue, Phonological Features, North Dravidian, Odisha State

1.0 Introduction

Kisan, a mother tongue, successively returned in different Censuses, is closely related to Kurukh/Oraon language of North Dravidian group. It is primarily spoken in Odisha state. When a linguistic community migrates from one region to other region, especially away from the territory of members of its language family, it experiences tremendous pressure in accepting the change in vocabulary and other structures of language. Changes in vocabulary are a prominent one whereas the changes in morphological and syntactical structure, is less obvious. This article attempts to bring out the phonological features of Kisan mother tongue spoken in Odisha.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr Perumalsamy

P. Perumalsamy M.A., Ph.D.
Professor cum Deputy Director
Central Institute of Indian Languages
Manasagangotri
Mysuru- 570006
Karnataka, India
dr_ppsamycal@yahoo.co.in
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