Volume 7, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Language contact in South Asia; Guest Editors: Jessica K. Ivani and John Peterson

A question that should be asked in all cases of proposed convergence areas is whether the observed similarities do in fact reflect convergent developments or are due to chance. This paper presents three case studies from South Asia which demonstrate that accidental similarities are more common than is often acknowledged. To rule out chance similarities, convergence accounts must be supported by fine-grained examinations of the geographical and historical evidence.

We present initial exploratory work on illuminating the long-standing question of areal versus genealogical connections in South Asia using computational data visualization tools. With respect to genealogy, we focus on the subclassification of Indo-Aryan, the most ubiquitous language family of South Asia. The intent here is methodological: we explore computational methods for visualizing large datasets of linguistic features, in our case 63 features from 200 languages representing four language families of South Asia, coming out of a digitized version of Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India . To this dataset we apply phylogenetic software originally developed in the context of computational biology for clustering the languages and displaying the clusters in the form of networks. We further explore multiple correspondence analysis as a way of illustrating how linguistic feature bundles correlate with extrinsically defined groupings of languages (genealogical and geographical). Finally, map visualization of combinations of linguistic features and language genealogy is suggested as an aid in distinguishing genealogical and areal features. On the whole, our results are in line with the conclusions of earlier studies: Areality and genealogy are strongly intertwined in South Asia, the traditional lower-level subclassification of Indo-Aryan is largely upheld, and there is a clearly discernible areal east–west divide cutting across language families.

The high-altitude Hindu Kush–Karakoram region is home to more than 50 language communities, belonging to six phylogenies. The significance of this region as a linguistic area has been discussed in the past, but the tendency has been to focus on individual features and phenomena, and more seldom have there been attempts at applying a higher degree of feature aggregation with tight sampling. In the present study, comparable first-hand data from as many as 59 Hindu Kush–Karakoram language varieties, was collected and analyzed. The data allowed for setting up a basic word list as well as for classifying each variety according to 80 binary structural features (phonology, lexico-semantics, grammatical categories, clause structure and word order properties). While a comparison of the basic lexicon across the varieties lines up very closely with the established phylogenetic classification, structural similarity clustering gives results clearly related to geographical proximity within the region and often cuts across phylogenetic boundaries. The strongest evidence of areality tied to the region itself (vis-à-vis South Asia in general on the one hand and Central/West Asia on the other) relates to phonology and lexical structure, whereas morphosyntactic properties mostly place the region’s languages within a larger areal or macro-areal distribution. The overall structural analysis also lends itself to recognizing six distinct micro-areas within the region, lining up with geo-cultural regions identified in previous ethno-historical studies. The present study interprets the domain-specific distributions as layers of areality that are each linked to a distinct historical period, and that taken together paint a picture of a region developing from high phylogenetic diversity, through massive Indo-Aryan penetration and language shifts, to today’s dramatically shrinking diversity and structural stream-lining propelled by the dominance of a few lingua francas.

In this study, we investigate the possible presence of an east–west divide in Indo-Aryan languages suggested in previous literature (Peterson, John. 2017a. Fitting the pieces together – towards a linguistic prehistory of eastern-central South Asia (and beyond).  Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics  4(2). 211–257.), with the further hypothesis that this divide may be linked to the influence of the Munda languages, spoken in the eastern part of the subcontinent. Working with 217 fine-grained variables on a sample of 27 Indo-Aryan and Munda languages, we test the presence of a geographical divide within Indo-Aryan using computational methods such as cluster analysis in combination with visual statistical inference. Our results confirm the presence of a geographical divide for the whole dataset and most of the individual features. We then proceed to compute the degree of similarity between the Indo-Aryan languages and Munda, using a Bayesian alternative to a t-test. The results for most features support the claim that the languages identified in the eastern clusters are indeed more similar to Munda, thereby opening up further research scenarios for the history of this region.

Four Indo-Aryan linguistic varieties are spoken in the state of Jharkhand in eastern central India, Sadri/Nagpuri, Khortha, Kurmali and Panchparganiya, which are considered by most linguists to be dialects of other, larger languages of the region, such as Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili, although their speakers consider them to be four distinct but closely related languages, collectively referred to as “Sadani”. In the present paper, we first make use of the program COG by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to show that these four varieties do indeed form a distinct, compact genealogical group within the Magadhan language group of Indo-Aryan. We then go on to argue that the traditional classification of these languages as dialects of other languages appears to be based on morphosyntactic differences between these four languages and similarities with their larger neighbors such as Bhojpuri and Magahi, differences which have arisen due to the different contact situations in which they are found.