Dialects in the Indo-Aryan landscape

The Indo-Aryan language family currently occupies a significant region of the Indian subcontinent, its member languages being spoken in the bulk of North India, as well as in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The historical depth of the textual record and the geographical breadth of the Indo-Aryan linguistic area, the diversity of its languages (226 in all), and its many speakers (∼1.5 billion in number) all serve to make Indo-Aryan a complex object of linguistic investigation. This chapter offers an overview of the broad structure of the Indo-Aryan family and a classification of its major member languages, tracing briefly the historical record which leads to its synchronic distribution. It is crucial to note that Indo-Aryan is not one language, and a comparative study of the “dialects” of Indo-Aryan necessarily involves a (historical) comparison between several mutually unintelligible languages – many of them with millions of speakers, deep literary records, and complex dialectal differences within. The level of resolution at which variation within Indo-Aryan can be considered in this brief survey is thus different from the intra-linguistic level at which dialectal variation is usually studied. The presence of Indo-Aryan (whose closest relatives within the Indo-European language family are the neighboring Iranian languages) in the Indian subcontinent can be dated back to approximately the early second millenium B.C.E. The influx of Indo-Aryan speakers first occurred in the mountainous areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan and the river plains of Punjab, with gradual migrations eastward and southward over the millennia. Within the early phase of Indo-Aryan expansion, we can identify the initial geographical center as the Upper Indus valley (now in Pakistan) and the later center (towards the end of the Vedic period) to be the Gangetic plains of North India.1 By the time of the Buddha (6th century BCE) most of North India (i.e. north of the Vindhya mountain ranges and the Narmada river) was Indo-Aryan speaking, these groups having displaced the original languages of the region, which included Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic languages as well as languages of unknown stock (see Witzel 1999 for a detailed review of substrate evidence). Gradually, over the next millennium and a half, Indo-Aryan further spread towards the South, occupying areas south of the Narmada river (the region corresponding to the Marathi and Oriya speaking territory in the map in Figure 1.). It is this contiguous geographical territory over which the modern dialectological landscape of Indo-Aryan is to be found. The non-contiguous Indo-Aryan languages (which include, for instance, Sinhala (Sri Lanka), Divehi (Madives), Parya (Tadjekistan), and Romani (mainly Eastern Europe)) are the result of pre-modern migrations of Indo-Aryan speakers into non Indo-Aryan territory (Masica 1993: 22). Fifteen of the twenty-two official languages recognized by the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution are Indo-Aryan. This status allows the use of these languages for both educational and regional administrative purposes. Pakistan and Bangladesh recognize only Urdu and