LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 22:7 July 2022
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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Central Vowels of Urali and Other Dravidian Tribal Languages in
the Microlinguistic Area: A Typological Study

Prof. Sam Mohan Lal

After the introduction of the existence of Dravidian family of languages by Alexander Campbell in the year 1816, it was Robert Caldwell who originally came from Scotland wrote the first comparative grammar of Dravidian languages. After this monumental work of Caldwell to a greater extent it was revealed to the world about the existence of a separate and highly developed group of languages called Dravidian family of languages which has approximately 222 million speakers. These many people speak 27 languages and several other tribal languages / dialects. Caldwell’s comparative grammar made several scholars to develop interest in the studies of Dravidian languages. Subsequently, several of them wrote descriptive grammars of Dravidian languages spoken in India which include many tribal languages spoken in the southern part of India. In south the Western Ghats area which includes the Nilgiri belt has several Dravidian tribal languages.

Apart from Southern part of India, India as a country has several languages and has extensive multilingualism. Having seen the linguistic diversity and multilingualism in India, Emeneau while discussing about the concept India as a linguistic area, had stated that any area which includes languages belonging to more than one family but showing traits in common which are found not to belong to the other members of (at least) one of the families. (M. B. Emeneau, Source: Language, Vol. 32, No. 1, Jan. - March 1956, pp. 3-16). Since Western Ghats area which includes the Nilgiri belt has several tribal languages, after the concept of India as a linguistic area put forth by Emeneau, in the year 1980 both Diffloath and Zvelebil have identified certain features of diffusion and convergence among the various local languages of the Nilgiris and advocate for the study of Nilgiri areal studies using the term Microarea. (Zvelebil in Dravidian Linguistics an introduction, 1990) and this concept was further explored by Emeneau and he could identify extensive polyglottism and bi/multilingualism in the Nilgiris which is unique to this part of the Western Ghats. Subsequently, he made an attempt to identify Nilgiris as a linguistic area and mentioned that this area can be termed as a linguistic micro area. (Emeneau, 1985).

With this introduction if we look into one feature of centralized vowels in the Tribal languages of Nilgiris, we could find lot of variations and irregularities in the phonemic system of the tribal languages spoken in this area. For instance, IruLa, one of the Nilgiri languages, has the entire system of centralized vowels /?, ë, ä, ö, ü/ as phonemes. Diffloth and Zvelebil, 1968 cited in Gnanasundaram and Rangan (eds.) 2015.

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

Sam Mohan Lal
Prof-cum-Deputy Director (Retired)
Central Institute of Indian languages
Mysore
sammohanlal@gmail.com
+919481066218
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