M. B. Emeneau

ENGLISH IN SOUTH ASIA

The profile of English in the subcontinent is different from that in 1947 when the colonial period came to an end and the country was divided into India and Pakistan. In linguistic terms there are four major language families: Indo-Aryan, used by the majority of the population, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Munda. The formal introduction of English in South Asia has passed through several stages. What started as an educational debate in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries culminated in Lord Macaulays much-maligned Minute of 1835, which initiated planned activity for introducing the English language into South Asian education. The major features which contribute to the distinctiveness of South Asian English are varied and complex. First, English is an additional language in South Asia; this means that in the total linguistic repertoire of the users of English, English may be a second, third, or n-th language. In grammar, British English continues to provide a yardstick for standardisation of South Asian English.

Dravidian Kinship Terms

[Proto-Dravidian had a class of kinship nouns which occurred only in the possessed construction (inalienably possessed); this probably was a syntactic rather than a morphological construction. The personal and reflexive pronouns which occurred as attributes in this construction were only the plural ones; distinction of number in the possessor was not indicated, and could be gathered only from the context. The evidence is drawn from Old Tamil, Kota, Gondi, Kolami, Kuwi, and Kurukh.1]

Dravidian studies : selected papers

It contains 27 articles on Dravidian subjects. Of these 27, 23 deal with linguistic topics, several ranging through the Dravidian family as a whole; others concentrate on specific languages, such as Toda, Kota Kodagu, Brahui, but all attempt to fit specific language data into the comparative study the languages of the family.