Brill's Studies in South and Southwest Asian Languages – serie

The book was co-edited by Brian Spooner, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.Language policy in Central Asia, Afghanistan and the immediately surrounding neighboring countries has a long and varied history. The Iranian revolution of 1978, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan since 2001 have left the area in a state of flux. This volume gives a better picture about what is official and explicit, what is not official but implicit or general practice, and what the likely future developments might be. It is very clear that multilingualism, whether it involves Persian, Russian or English in addition to other languages, not only has long been a part of the scene, but will probably continue to be so.

In The Genesis of Sri Lanka Malay: A Case of Extreme Language Contact, the synchrony and diachrony of Sri Lanka Malay are investigated from a variety of angles: Experts on South Asia, South East Asia, Creole Studies, Areal Linguistics, Typology, and Sociolinguistics all contribute their share to a truly global analysis of one of the most extreme cases of language contact, where the Malays changed the whole morphosyntax of their language in as little as just over three centuries. The genesis of Sri Lanka Malay informs theories of language contact, language change, and 'creolization', as well as sociolinguistics, language policy and planning and a critical analysis of the 'endangered language' discourse.

Winner of the 2015 Kenneth L. Hale Award! A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language is the first-ever detailed and exhaustive account of Great Andamanese, a moribund language spoken on the Andamanese Islands belonging to India in the Bay of Bengal. This important documentation covers all major areas of the grammar of Great Andamanese and gives us a first detailed look at this unique language, which is on the verge of extinction. Of particular interest here is the discussion of the body division class markers which play an important role throughout much of the grammar and which are documented in this volume for the first time. The volume will be of interest for general linguists from the fields of linguistic typology and areal linguistics as well as those interested in South Asian languages in general.

Atong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India and Bangladesh. Seino van Breugel provides a deep and thorough coverage and analysis of all major areas of the grammar, which makes this book of great interest and value to general linguists and typologists as well as area specialists. Alongside an Atong-English dictionary and five fully-glossed Atong texts recorded during extensive fieldwork, this work also provides a sizable ethnolinguistic introduction to the speakers and their culture. Of particular interest is the pragmatic approach taken for the grammatical analysis. Whereas the form of an utterance provides some clue as to its possible meaning, inference is always needed to arrive at the most relevant interpretation within the context in which the utterance occurs."This is a very important book for South Asian and Sino-Tibetan linguistic scholarship. Of the 200 languages of Northeast India, only a handful have been documented; the present work brings the number of full-scale modern grammars for these languages to six. Thus it represents a unique and extremely valuable contribution." Professor Scott DeLancey University of Oregon"This is a solid academic work which makes a huge contribution to the field. There is no other detailed account of this particular language, and it is highly doubtful that anyone will write something more comprehensive in the future." Dr Willem de Reuse University of North Texas

A Functional Account of Marathi's Voice Phenomena offers a comprehensive account of the formal and semantic aspects of the two most prominent voice phenomena in Marathi: the passive and the causative. Previous studies offer many partial insights into various aspects of Marathi’s passives and causatives. However, a comprehensive description of the formal, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of Marathi’s passives and causatives as not been available so far. Attempting to fill this gap, the present monograph offers a description in the functional-typological framework. At the same time it introduces the reader to the rich tradition of grammatical studies in Marathi, which up to now have remained inaccessible to those who are unfamiliar with the language.

The Kurux Language: Grammar, Texts and Lexicon by Masato Kobayashi and Bablu Tirkey is a comprehensive description of Kurux, a northern Dravidian tribal language with two million speakers. Isolated in the Chota Nagpur Plateau of Eastern India, Kurux shows a unique mixture of archaic Dravidian traits and innovations induced by contact with neighboring Indo-Aryan and Munda languages, and has posed questions regarding language change and Dravidian subgrouping.Making use of first-hand materials from their fieldwork, Kobayashi and Tirkey analyze the complexities of the language in the grammar section. This book also contains transcribed and glossed texts, and a lexicon with more than 9,000 entries, and serves both as reference for linguists and learning resource for students.

Atong Texts by Seino van Breugel consists of a collection of 37 glossed, annotated and translated narratives in the Atong language (Tibeto-Burman) of Meghalaya, India, presented in phonemic standard orthography. This testimony of cultural and linguistic heritage of the Atongs, who are members of the Garo Tribe, complements the author’s Grammar of Atong, also published by Brill.Each text is preceded by a systematic literary analysis. The photos in the appendix provide a visual impression of the environment in which the stories are told. This book is of great value to Tibeto-Burmanists, general linguists, discourse analysts and everyone interested in the languages, history and folklore of Northeast-India in general, and Meghalaya in particular.

Beṭṭa Kurumba is a Dravidian language spoken in the Nilgiri and Waynad Hills of India. Annotated Texts in Beṭṭa Kurumba presents folktales and dialogues in this language, together with a grammatical sketch and a glossary. These interlinearised texts provide rich data for linguistic analysis, as well as some of the earliest published cultural information about a highly understudied ethnic group. The cultural information is presented, for the most part, by the Beṭṭa Kurumbas themselves, who speak in their own native language about aspects of their lifestyle, spiritual beliefs, and social organization into clans.

In Srinagar Burushaski: A Descriptive and Comparative Account with Analyzed Texts Sadaf Munshi offers the structural description of a lesser-known regional variety of Burushaski spoken in Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian-administered state of Jammu & Kashmir. The description includes a comprehensive and comparative account of the structural features of Srinagar Burushaski in terms of phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax. The grammar is supported by an extensive digital corpus housed at the University of North Texas Digital Library. Using contemporary spoken language samples from Srinagar, Nagar, Hunza and Yasin varieties of Burushaski as well as data from the available literature, Munshi provides a thorough understanding of the historical development of Srinagar Burushaski, complementing the existing studies on Burushaski dialectology.

Expressives in the South Asian Linguistic Area offers the first comprehensive account of this important understudied word class from synchronic, diachronic, literary, and descriptive perspectives. The work contains studies from the four major language families of South Asia (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman) and covers domains in semantics, morphosyntax, and phonotactics. It also includes studies from literature and film that show how expressive form and function are embedded in performative contexts. Finally, the volume also contains first of its kind data from several small endangered languages from the region. Proposing an innovative methodology that combines structural and semiotic analysis, the volume advances a more holistic understanding of areal phenomena that departs from previous studies of the South Asian linguistic area.

This monograph is a contribution to the documentation of the linguistic situation of the Kinnaur district in Himachal Pradesh (Indian Himalayas) which has been so far almost undescribed. The Sino-Tibetan languages Kinnauri and Navakat and the Indo-Aryan language Kinnauri Pahari, all spoken in Kinnaur, are described both individually and as parts of a multifaceted linguistic ecology that extends into the surroundingwider Himalayan region.The author combines traditional linguistic description and a quantitative computational procedure to disentangle genealogical and arealcharacteristics of the languages of Kinnaur.