This volume collects twenty-nine published and unpublished papers by the linguist James Gair, considered the foremost western scholar of the Sri Lankan languages Sinhala and Jaffna Tamil. Ranging over thirty years, his work also considers issues in a variety of Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Bengali. The collection reflects the wide range of Gair's interests, from morpho-syntactic questions to questions regarding historical and areal linguistics, especially language contact and diglossia, and extending to language acquisition. By collecting these papers and making them newly accessible, this volume will provide an important resource not only for scholars of these languages but for linguists interested in the theoretical issues Gair explores.

The field of South Asian linguistics has undergone considerable growth and advancement in recent years, as a wider and more diverse range of languages have become subject to serious linguistic study, and as advancements in theoretical linguistics are applied to the rich linguistic data of South Asia. In this growth and diversity, it can be difficult to retain a broad grasp on the current state of the art, and to maintain a sense of the underlying unity of the field. This volume brings together twenty articles by leading scholars in South Asian linguistics, which showcase the cutting-edge research currently being undertaken in the field, and offer the reader a comprehensive introduction to the state of the art in South Asian linguistics. The contributions to the volume focus primarily on syntax and semantics, but also include important contributions on morphological and phonological questions. The contributions also cover a wide range of languages, from well-studied Indo-Aryan languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Bangla and Panjabi, through Dravidian languages to endangered and understudied Tibeto-Burman languages. This collection is a must-read for all scholars interested in current trends and advancements in South Asian linguistics.

With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.

South Asia is a rich and fascinating linguistic area, its many hundreds of languages from four major language families representing the distinctions of caste, class, profession, religion, and region. This comprehensive new volume presents an overview of the language situation in this vast subcontinent in a linguistic, historical and sociolinguistic context. An invaluable resource, it comprises authoritative contributions from leading international scholars within the fields of South Asian language and linguistics, historical linguistics, cultural studies and area studies. Topics covered include the ongoing linguistic processes, controversies, and implications of language modernization; the functions of South Asian languages within the legal system, media, cinema, and religion; language conflicts and politics, and Sanskrit and its long traditions of study and teaching. Language in South Asia is an accessible interdisciplinary book for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, language planning and South Asian studies.

The South Asian languages, mainly Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, have become a focus of interest in the formal study of language as a natural consequence of the research program of the Principle and Parameters approach and an enforced interest in exploring the parametrical space of human language. The contributions to the present volume combine theoretical reasoning in syntax and phonology with a comparative research agenda in which South Asian languages figure prominently. The topics range from issues of clause structure, serial verb constructions, cleft- and question formation, to the question of what the proper syntactic format of modification should be, issues of binding theory and raising, and issues of complementation, the clausal periphery and clausal typing. The collection of articles concludes with two chapters on Dravidian and comparative phonology and a chapter on the shaping of phonological awareness by different writing systems. The authors and the editors devote this piece of work to Professor K.A. Jayaseelan, one of present-day India s most influential linguists.

This volume provides a first of its kind account of expressives in the region from a grammatical, historical, and literary perspective. It provides case studies from the four major language families of South Asia.

Linguistics Archaeology of South Asia brings together linguistics and archaeological evidence of South Asian prehistory.

South Asia is home to a large number of languages and dialects. Although linguists working on this region have made significant contributions to our understanding of language, society, and language in society on a global scale, there is as yet no recognized international forum for the exchange of ideas amongst linguists working on South Asia. The Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics is designed to be just that forum. It brings together empirical and theoretical research and serves as a testing ground for the articulation of new ideas and approaches which may be grounded in a study of South Asian languages but which have universal applicability. Each volume will have three major sections: I. Invited contributions consisting of state-of-the-art essays on research in South Asian languages. II. Refereed open submissions focusing on relevant issues and providing various viewpoints. III. Reports from around the world, book reviews and abstracts of doctoral theses.

Explores the similarities and differences of about forty South Asian languages from the four different language families.

This edited volume on Munda linguistics makes an important contribution in terms of analysing and demonstrating key issues such as Proto-Munda reconstruction, migration of Munda language speakers, and synchronic linguistic issues in Munda languages spoken in India. The contributions here reflect the diverse range of scholarship on Munda languages which combines empirical and theoretical discussion; the volume will be an extremely useful reference after a long gap in research on Munda languages and it will be useful not only for scholars interested in research on Munda languages, but also to those interested in typological studies and in documentary and field linguistics more generally. Moreover, this will be a major contribution to the understanding of the cultural and linguistic dynamics of South Asia as a linguistic area.