Jazyki mira: Novye indoarijskie jazyki [Languages of the World: New Indo-Aryan languages]

Oranskaja, Tatjana Mazurova, Julia Kibrik, Andrej Kulikov, Leonid [UCL] Rusakov, Aleksandr

This book continues the encyclopedic multi-volume series “Languages of the World”, which is being prepared at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences. This volume is dedicated to the New Indo-Aryan languages which, along with their now extinct relatives, comprise the Indo-Aryan group of the Indo-European language family. These languages are primarily spoken throughout South Asia, including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The volume also includes information about the languages and dialects that separated from the main Indo-Aryan area, particularly Romani. Apart from the descriptions of the major Indo-Aryan languages, this volume also contains information on many minor languages and dialects of the region, including unwritten and endangered languages. Systematic grammatical descriptions of some of these are published here for the first time. Each essay follows the typologically oriented template maintained throughout the “Languages of the World” series. This template imposes a uniform sociolinguistic and synchronic structural characterization upon the individual languages and thereby ensures the comparability of the descriptions of the different languages. This volume also contains an article on the writing systems used for these languages and a set of language maps. The volume is intended both as a fundamental linguistic study and as a reference source. It is addressed to a wide audience of linguists of various specializations, historians, cultural anthropologists, teachers and students, and all those interested in Indo-Aryan languages.