in collaboration with

INTRODUCTION

The Centre for Linguistics, SLL&CS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India is organising a two-day National Seminar on “India as a Linguistic Area: Exploring Shared Features Across Language Families” on 4th and 5th March 2025 and a workshop on “Writing Grammars” on 6th March 2025 in collaboration with Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru and ALS Indigenous Languages, Asian Literary Society. This two-day seminar and one-day workshop will be an initiative towards exploring India as a linguistic area, language contact, linguistic convergence and divergence, areal Linguistics, language maintenance and shift, language variation and change, languages and dialects in contact, linguistic diversity and language harmony, typological features, intangible cultural heritages, common and shared linguistic expressions and discourse structure of Indian languages. In addition to various paper and poster presentations, there will be panel discussions and plenary talks on the related theme. The seminar will end with a workshop on ‘Writing Grammars’ on the third day.

INDIA AS A LINGUISTIC AREA 

Indian linguistic area is characterised by common linguistic traits such as retroflex sounds, SOV word order, absence of prepositions, morphological reduplication (expressives), echo formations, reduplicated verbal adverbs, explicator compound verbs, use of converbs, oblique marked subjects, and morphological causatives, among many others. Apart from areal features, there are also those features that identify a micro-area, for example, nasalisation, aspiration, relative-correlative constructions in Northern India, gender agreement in Western India, the quotative verb ‘say’ as a complementiser in Southern and Northeastern India, etc. India, a multilingual nation with diverse ethnic and linguistic communities, represents six distinct language families spread over a large region and spoken by more than 1.4 billion speakers. The typologically distinct languages of India contribute to the country's rich diversity. While Indo-Aryan languages are highly inflecting, Dravidian languages are both agglutinative and inflecting, Austro-Asiatic languages are highly polysynthetic and incorporating, and Tibeto-Burman languages are analytic. Similarly, the Great Andamanese languages are agglutinative and the only head-marking languages. The Austronesian languages, consisting of Onge and Jarawa, are also agglutinative in nature. In the present scenario of linguistic diffusion, such compartments can no longer be ascribed to (Abbi 2012). Notwithstanding the diversity, many phonological, structural, and lexical features are common across these languages. We observe the diffusion of linguistic items alongside cultural values, ideas, beliefs, and practices transmitted from one segment of society to another in a distinct pattern.

ILAESFALF - 2025 

According to Weinreich (1952), ‘language contact can result in such far-reaching changes that the affected language assumes a different structural shape’. Language is a rich source of information on the human past, complementary to the archaeological and genetic records. However, ‘language as history’ has always been dominated by the concept of language families; linguistic areas have always remained in an inferior relation. The family-wise classification of languages and finding their shared features is not only the objective of this seminar, but also, efforts will be made to reconstruct the historical linguistics and cultural processes that led to India as a Linguistic Area. The rich diversity in Northeast India, a reservoir of five language families, shows the emergence of Nagamese, an Assamese-lexifier creole language in Nagaland, Dakkhini in the Deccan region of India, Sadri in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Bihar, and also the existence of Hindi-based creole in Arunachal Pradesh as a lingua franca. The prevalence of Indo-Aryan languages in the Northeast and other parts of India led to the assimilation of lexical borrowing and morphosyntactic features into the Northeastern languages, and vice versa. The surviving Tai Kadai languages (i.e., Tai Khamti) exhibit distinct typological features of an isolating language, combined with Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan influences, resulting from areal convergence and cultural exchange.