The present volume is a description of Pengo, a tribal Dravidian language spoken in the Koraput district of Orissa, and in the adjoining district of Kalhandi in India. Hitherto unknown to scholarship, it was investigated by the authors at various periods between 1957-66. Their work is intended to provide a "comprehensive account of the…

There have been few Australian studies of language maintenance amongst immigrant languages from the Indian subcontinent. The present study focuses on Tamil speakers in Melbourne from Sri Lanka or India, who are Hindus or Christians. Tamil is a pluricentric language that has been under the domination of English in these countries, at least amongst…

The article handles nasalization found in Jaffna Tamil. Conclusions are based on the results of a kymographic study of nominal forms occurring in the colloquial speech of the author. Not being a distinctive vocalic element, nasalization is handled on a prosodic level, its occurrence at word and syllabic level is discussed. (CLK)

Gondi, a Dravidian language spoken by 2.2 million people in central India, is a chain of dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible. This study looked at a two-step sound change, responsible for this dialect division. (ER)

The first chapter of this grammar of prose Tamil introduces the alphabet and orthography. Following chapters deal with parts of speech and verb constructions. A final chapter deals with colloquialisms and foreign words. Appended are lists of abbreviations, grammatical and temporal terms, and other information useful to the student, as well as a…

The syntax of the relative clause in the Saraswat Brahmin dialect of Konkani, an Indo-Aryan language, has been Dravidianized because of the impact of the Dravidian Kannada language, operating through bilingual speakers. The Konkani-Kannada bilingual situation is described and an explanatory account of the syntactic change is given. (Author/CLK)

English as spoken as a second language in India has developed distinct sound patterns in terms of both segmental and prosodic characteristics. We investigate the differences between two groups varying in native language (Gujarati, Tamil) to evaluate to what extent Indian English (IE) accents are based on a single target phonological-phonetic…

This reference grammar is a description of the speech of educated people of the Bangalore/Mysore area of Karnataka State in South India. This particular dialect is used in films and, to some extent, on the radio. The four sections of the book deal with: (1) phonology, (2) the noun phrase, (3) the verb phrase, and (4) syntax. Each item that is…

Adoption of Sinhala and Tamil as the media of instruction in the schools, radio, and the participation of non-governmental agencies in adult education campaigns have all played a part in developing a new rural elite and given rise to a need for vocational training and continuing education in urban areas. (AG)

Three experiments were undertaken to examine second and fifth grade Telugu-speaking children's awareness of phonological and orthographic properties of familiar Telugu words. Experiment 1 focused on the strategies the children used in completing word fragments. Experiment 2 examined the children's ability to judge and generate rhyming words, and…

Two mixed varieties of Kannada, Perso-Arabic Kannada and English-Kannada, are analyzed with a view to characterizing the sociolinguistic functions of such mixed languages. The introduction consists of a definition of code-mixing, a brief review of earlier studies, and a statement of the aim and scope of the present study. Section Two is devoted to…

Reading has been an extensively studied topic in the Western hemisphere for several decades, and an enormous amount of empirical data has accumulated on various aspects of reading alphabetic writing systems like English. Of late, there has been some interest in the processing of non-alphabetic scripts. However, there is hardly any empirical…

Reading and writing deficits in two multilingual speakers of Kannada, Hindi and English are described. Disorders of the two patients (Mr G and Ms S) had different etiologies. Mr G had severe alexia with agraphia in English as well as in Kannada and Hindi. Ms S exhibited dissociation across the languages, showing symptoms of surface dyslexia in…

The morphological and lexical bases of Dravidian complementation are explored by proposing a series of rules that govern the distribution of finite predicates in the Dravidian sentence. The distribution of two verbs, "a-" ("become") and "en-" ("say"), is shown to be correlated with the distribution of finite predicates. These predicates are…

This final report describes the development of a textbook for advanced, spoken Tamil. There is a marked dirrerence between literary Tamil and spoken Tamil, and training in the former is not sufficient for speaking the language in everyday situations with reasonably educated native speakers. There is difficulty in finding suitable material that…