Tibeto-Kinnauri languages
There have been several attempts to classify the Tibeto-Burman languages, for example, Shafer (1955, 1966, 1967, 1974), Benedict (1972), Thurgood (1985) and Nishi (1990). Classification of Tibeto-Burman languages is still uncertain. Fig. 1 presents the classification of the Tibeto-Kinnauri languages based on our current knowledge. The postulation of Tibeto-Kinnauri as a separate branch is from Benedict (1972) and the classification of West Himalayish is from Nishi (1990). The parenthesized languages under West Himalayish are my additions (Saxena 1992).
Fig. 1 Classification of the Tibeto-Kinnauri subgroup
Tibeto-Burman
Bodic
Bodish
Tibeto-Kinnauri
Tibetan: Western, Central, Southern, Khams, Amdo, Monpa
West Himalayish:
a) Kinnauri-PatÁani, (Tinani)
b) Thebor-Gahri, Rangpa, Chaudangsi, (Darmiya)
The Tibeto-Burman language family includes several hundred languages. These languages are spoken from northeastern Vietnam in the east to northern Pakistan in the west, from the Tibetan plateau in the north to the Malay peninsula in the south. There has been relatively little work done on comparative Tibeto-Burman. Genetic classification of some of the subbranches remains problematic. However, most Tibeto-Burmanists agree that the four major branches of the Tibeto-Burman language family are Bodic, Baric, Burmic and Karenic. The two subbranches of Bodic are Bodish and East Himalayan. Tibeto-Kinnauri belongs to the Bodish subbranch. It includes Tibetan, which is one of the two best known Tibeto-Burman languages (the other being Burmese) and West Himalayish languages, which are some of the least documented languages among the Tibeto-Burman language family. The Tibeto-Kinnauri languages considered in this monograph are Tibetan, Kinnauri, Pa
tÁani and Tinani.
West Himalayish
There has been very little work done on the West Himalayish languages. We do not, for example, have a definite knowledge of how many languages there are in this subbranch. The following languages are listed in the Linguistic Survey of India (Grierson 1909) as belonging to the West Himalayish subgroup Gahri (also known as [= hereafter] Bunan), Pa
tÁani (= Pattani, Manchad), Tinani (= Tinan), Kanaawarii (= Kinnauri), Ranglooi (= Ranglo), Kanaashii (= Kanash), Tibarskad (= Thebor), Rangkas, Darmiya (= Darma), Chaudangsii (= Chaudans), and Byaangsii (= Byans). Chitkal (= Chitkulii) was first mentioned in Bailey (1920). Kinnauri, PatÁani and Tinani are spoken in the Himachal Pradesh state in India.
Socio-cultural background
The Indian subcontinent has a long history of linguistic diversity and multilingualism, spanning more than three millennia. Languages spoken in this region belong to four language families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman and Munda.
Societal multilingualism is an established tradition in India, where not all languages, which are spoken in one community, are employed in all spheres of activity. Instead, in the Indian context, language use is often situationally differentiated, where one language is used, for example, in school or at work, another at home, and possibly yet another for religious purposes. Individuals in such communities may either be fluent in all the languages involved or they are fluent in their mothertongue, but have working knowledge of the other languages in that particular social situation. In this regard, the linguistic situation in India differs from the pattern which migrating social groups in the Western world commonly display, where the second or third generation immigrants give up their mother tongue, and accept the language of the new country (for example, English in the US) as their own language. In such cases language shift is the norm and language maintenance is an exception. In the Indian setting, on the other hand, language maintenance is the norm, not the exception. A native speaker of Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken in Karnataka, maintains his/her language, even when (s)he moves to another state (for example, Gujarat, where Gujarati is the dominant language) and the next generation continues to regard Kannada as their mother tongue and uses Gujarati in certain specific spheres of activities. Such contact situations have enormous impact on the linguistic structures of these languages. The case study by Gumperz and Wilson (1971) of the linguistic situation in a particular multilingual speech community in India, the village of Kupwar, shows that as a result of close long-term language contact, shift from one language to another does not necessarily mean shift from one grammar to the grammar of another language. Instead, the grammars of the three languages involved have converged to the point that switching from one language to another often entails nothing more than the exchange of lexical items of one language for those of another in a grammatical framework which remains the same across languages.
Despite this stable multilingualism, language death is not uncommon in the Indian context, either. In India, as elsewhere in the world, languages have died and are dying at an alarming rate because of the social upheavals brought about by industrialization and urbanization. Indigenous languages with no written tradition and with no or very little political and/or economic power at the local and national level are especially likely to fall by the wayside enroute to modernity. Speakers of these languages in many cases favor the neighboring dominant language rather than their own language, seeing the latter as more of a liability than as an asset. Some languages completely vanish from the face of the earth and others are given up in particular contexts. The socially dominant languages in India belong to two language families: Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, both of which are relatively well researched and described in the linguistic literature. Communities which speak West Himalayish languages are classified as tribal communities. Tribal languages have been ignored to the extent that we do not even know how many of them exist.
In modern times, partly because of the rapid development in technology and changing socio-economic patterns in India, the socio-cultural patterns in the region where West Himalayish languages are spoken, are also undergoing changes. As is typical of the whole of India, speakers of minority languages (West Himalayish languages are regarded as minority languages) are bilingual to a varying extent. While minority-language speakers learn the language of the dominant group, the reverse is usually not the case. Most young people of this region who strive for higher education are bilingual. There is no university in this region, forcing them to migrate (in some cases temporarily and in others permanently) outside this area, where the medium of instruction and the lingua-franca are not their mother tongue. Many of them also end up taking jobs outside their region. Such social situations have important linguistic consequences for these languages. It will be suggested there that one set of the modern aspect markers in West Himalayish language represents a case of syntactic convergence with the neighboring Indic languages.
The geographical region where the West Himalayish languages are spoken display contact with ‘outsiders’ (i.e., non-West Himalayish) at various points in their history, manifesting layers of different socio-cultural traditions. Regions where Kinnauri, Pa
tÁani and Tinani are spoken lie on the Indo-Tibetan border. Tibet is a sacred land where Gods and Godesses live according to some Indian mythology. Pran Chopra ("On an Indian Wonder") proposes seeing a pervasive Indic influence in the region wherein all aspects of social life are impinged upon. This can, for example, be seen very clearly in the festivals of Kinnauri. The festivals of Kinnaur include Hindu festivals, Buddhists festivals and indigenous festivals.
Here is some brief information on the geographic description of the West Himalayish languages which I have worked on.
Kinnauri
Standard Kinnauri is spoken in the area extending from Saraahan to Poo, i.e., Nichar, Kalpa, Sangla (excluding two villages (Chitkal and Rakcham) where Chitkal is spoken), most subcounties in Morang, and several villages in the Poo county. The total number of native speakers of Kinnauri is 59,154 (Census report of India 1981).
Pa
tÁaniPa
tÁani is spoken in the PatÁan valley region, from Tandi to Thirot. It is the Lingua franca of the region. The number of native speakers, according to the Census report of India (1981), is 7,121. However, this number also includes the speakers of another language, Daagi.
Tinani
Tinani is spoken between Sissu Nullah and Tandi. This region is called Gondhala. Rangloi is an adjoining language, spoken in Khoksar. The number of native speakers of Tinani is 1,833 (Census report of India 1981).
Background literature: West Himalayish
While there are a number of individual Bodish languages and dialects for which documentation is lacking, the West Himalayish subbranch remains the most seriously underdocumented genetic unit within Bodic. While reconstructing the proto-Tibeto-Burman verb agreement system, DeLancey states,
The Kanauri languages [West Himalayish], unfortunately, constitute another group for which documentation is inadequate. (1989:324)
This can be measured by the fact that these languages have so far been considered non-tonal (thus tones are not marked on the data), whereas my work has shown that at least one of them (Pa
tÁani) is tonal (Saxena 1991a). Most of the works that are available on these languages, provide only sketchy descriptions of morphology and, at the most, a passing mention of syntax.
Two varieties of Kinnauri have been mentioned in the literature. They are labelled as Lower Kinnauri and Upper Kinnauri. There has been no comparative work done on these two varieties of Kinnauri, which allows one to determine whether they are two separate languages, or are two varieties of a single language. In this study we will concentrate on the Lower Kinnauri, which is also referred to as the standard variety of Kinnauri.
The available material on Kinnauri (Bailey 1909, Joshi and Rose 1909, Neethivanan 1971, Sharma 1988) are good initial attempts to describe Kinnauri. However, they miss some very important phonological and grammatical facts. They lack the kind of detailed information needed to do comparative and historical work (Saxena 1992, 1995, 1997).
Of the literature for the remaining languages of this group, we have only the Linguistic Survey of India (Grierson 1909), Francke (1909), Zoller (1983), Sharma (1989) and Saxena (1992,1997). Zoller (1983) is a reasonably complete and reliable description of Rangpa. Francke (1909) presents sets of verb paradigms and nominal conjugations in Tinani, Gahri, and Pa
tÁani. This provides useful material on begining work on case marking and verb morphology for these languages. However, it has limitations. Francke does not describe the morphemic alternations that are permissible, nor deals with the semantics of the copulas and verb endings, crucial for studies such as the present one. One faces similar problems while using Sharma (1988, 1989) as reference material.
Data for the present study: West Himalayish
The Kinnauri was collected during my two fieldtrips to India in 1989-90, 1994 and 1999. The description of my Kinnauri consultant, who have agreed to put the information on the web are as follows.
Kinnauri
Jwala Sukhi Negi lived in the Kanai village, which comes under the jurisdiction of Sangla county in Kinnaur district. She was about sixty five years old at the time of data collection. She never left Kinnaur, except for occasional visits to Simla, the closest city. She could understand and speak some Hindi, an Indic language. Although illiterate, she was a very good storyteller.
Santosh Negi was born and brought up in the Kanai village. She was about thirty three years old at the time of data collection. She had left Kinnaur ten years ago to go to school in Simla. She now works in a government office in Simla. Her family is still in Kinnaur, with whom she maintains close contact. She visits Kinnaur very frequently. She is well-versed in Hindi.
Suraj Negi was born and brought up in the Kanai village. She was about thirty seven years old at the time of data collection. She lives in the village with her daughter and her sister-in-law. She has never left Kinnaur, except for occasional visits to Simla to visit her sister. Unlike her sister, she is illiterate. She speaks Hindi fluently. I met her in Simla when she was visiting her sister. She is an extremely warm and friendly person. This characteristic of hers created some problems while working with her. Her desire to be accomodating proved to compromise data collection. She was afraid to say that a particular form is not acceptable in certain constructions. It took me a while to realize this. After that, I did not collect data from her, and had to recheck the entire dataset with Santosh Negi, who was not afraid to speak her mind.
Data collection technique
For my data collection I used a combination of direct elicitation and narratives, as I feel that a combination of these two techniques yields a better result than using either in isolation. I chose Hindi as the medium for data collection, because all of my consultants, except one, were well-versed in Hindi (I am also fluent in Hindi, my native language). Besides collecting a large corpus of direct-elicited data on various topics, I also collected narrative texts. The Kinnauri texts were collected primarily from Santosh Negi, Sneh Negi and Jwala Sukhi Negi. The data with Jwala Sukhi Negi was collected during my trip to her village in Kinnaur. Santosh accompanied me on this trip. All the stories were told in storytelling sessions, where Jwala Sukhi was the narrator and her family members were sitting around her. Storytelling was a common feature in their household. The tape recording was a novelty at the beginning of the first few sessions, but was soon forgotten. The stories were directed at her grandchildren, and the grandchildren in return responded to the narrator appropriately at various intervals. The narratives were folktales and personal narratives. Narratives collected from other informants were in more formal settings.
© Anju Saxena
<anju.saxena@ling.uu.se>