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Every region of India is and has been multilingual, with speakers of different languages and speakers of multiple languages. But literary 'multilingual locals' are often more fragmented than we think. While multilingualism suggests interest, and proficiency, in more than one literary language and tradition, very real barriers exist in terms of written vs. oral access, mutual interaction, and social and cultural hierarchies and exclusions. What does it mean to take multilingualism seriously when studying literature? One way, this essay suggests, is to consider works on a similar topic or milieu written in the different languages and compare both their literary sensibilities and their social imaginings. Rural Awadh offers an excellent example, as the site of many intersecting processes and discourses-of shared Hindu-Muslim sociality and culture and Muslim separatism, of nostalgia for a sophisticated culture and critique of zamindari exploitation and socio-economic backwardness, as the home of Urdu and of rustic Awadhi. This essay analyses three novels written at different times about rural Awadh-one set before 1947 and the others in the wake of the Zamindari Abolition Act of 1950 and the migration of so many Muslim zamindars from Awadh, either to Pakistan or to Indian cities. The first is Qazi Abdul Sattar's Urdu novel Shab gazida (1962), the other two are Shivaprasad Singh's Alag alag vaitarani (1970) and the Awadh subplot in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993). Without making them representatives of their respective languages, by comparing these three novels I am interested in exploring how they frame and what they select of Awadh culture, how much ground and sensibility they share, and how they fit within broader traditions of 'village writing' in Hindi, Urdu, and Indian English.

Language.

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Language attrition --- Language maintenance

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Sanzhi Dargwa belongs to the Dargwa (Dargi) languages (ISO dar; Glottocode sanz1248) which form a subgroup of the East Caucasian (Nakh-Dagestanian) language family. Sanzhi Dargwa is spoken by approximately 250 speakers and is severely endangered. This book is the first comprehensive descriptive grammar of Sanzhi, written from a typological perspective. It treats all major levels of grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) and also information structure. Sanzhi Dargwa is structurally similar to other East Caucasian languages, in particular Dargwa languages. It has a relatively large consonant inventory including pharyngeal and ejective consonants. Sanzhi morphology is concatenative and mainly suffixing. The language exhibits a mixture of dependent-marking in the form of a rich case inventory and head-marking in the form of verbal agreement. Nouns are divided into three genders. Verbal inflection conflates tense/aspect/mood/evidentiality in a rich array of synthetic and analytic verb forms as well as participles, converbs, a masdar (verbal noun), and infinitive and some other forms used in analytic tenses and subordinate clauses. Salient traits of the grammar are two independently operating agreement systems: gender/number agreement and person agreement. Within the nominal domain, modifiers agree with the head nominal in gender/number. Agreement within the clausal domain is mainly controlled by the argument in the absolutive case. Person agreement operates only at the clausal level and according to the person hierarchy 1, 2 > 3. Sanzhi has ergative alignment in the form of gender/number agreement and ergative case marking. The most frequent word order at the clause level is SOV, though all other logically possible word orders are also attested. In subordinate clauses, word order is almost exclusively head-final.

Language arts. --- Dargwa language.

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Semantic change - how the meanings of words change over time - has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans.

Language arts. --- Language arts

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Law --- English language --- Language and culture --- Language.