Under the direction of Dr. Paul Kiparsky, Ms. Ashwini Deo will conduct fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation. She will study three little-described Indo-Aryan languages spoken by mostly tribal/indigenous communities in Western India: Pawri and Dehawali from the Bhili group, and Ahirani from the Khandeshi group. Deo will use interviews and questionnaires, and collect texts from the oral tradition in two communities where these languages are spoken. On the basis of this material, the languages' grammatical features will be analyzed and described. They will then be compared to the standard languages, especially their closest relatives Marathi, Hindi, and Gujarati, with a view to finding out how they are related and how they have evolved.

This project will contribute to linguistic theory by using the new data to test the hypothesis that changes in inflections go hand in hand with changes in sentence structure. The project will also contribute to the history of the Indo-Aryan language family. The grammatical descriptions will be useful to other theorists and to South Asian specialists, as well as to the language communities for their efforts to promote literacy and language standardization. The data will go into a public database of texts and sound files where others can access it for their own research.

Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2003-06-15
Budget End
2006-05-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2003
Total Cost
$11,975
Indirect Cost
Name
Stanford University
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Palo Alto
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
94304