Week 9, Part 1: All Except Dravidian

In my previous post about South Asian languages, I mentioned that they would be mashed up into one language category due to similarities in phonology. However, after researching and inquiring about the grammar of these languages, I discovered that, while Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Gujarati have very similar grammar structures, Dravidian languages (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu) have very different grammar. Thus, this blog post will focus on major non-Dravidian languages in South Asia and a part 2 will be about Dravidian languages.

Parts of speech in these languages are broadly similar to those in English:

• Nouns have singular and plural forms

• Adjectives are placed before nouns

• Verb conjugation is generally pretty regular

However:

• Feminine and masculine nouns are distinguished

• I know this car and his problems. vs. I know this car and its problems.

• Comparative and superlative forms of adjectives aren't distinguished

• She is smart from her friend. vs. She is smarter than her friend.

• No parts of speech corresponding to articles

• Just eat ice cream. vs. Just eat the ice cream.

• Use postpositions (equivalent of prepositions) is different than English uses of prepositions

• She studied English since two years vs. She studied English for two years.

• We reached to the destination. vs. We reached the destination.

Major language interference occurs with questions and negation:

• Do auxiliary does not exist (i.e. You like ice cream? vs. Do you like ice cream?)

• Equivalent of no is used for negations (i.e. I no like ice cream. vs. I don't like ice cream)

• Common question reinforcers are used (i.e. Ice cream is good, isn't it? )

• Lack of to have equivalent causes to be to be used more often (i.e. Your book is with him vs. He has your book)

Due to the impact of British colonization in South Asia, there are many words that were taken from English and put into major South Asian languages. Usually this is very helpful to South Asian ELLs; however, sometimes these borrowed words can't be directly applied to English now because of how everchanging languages is (English words from then are not necessarily the same or even existing in the English language now) and because of changes in pronunciation in the words itself throughout the years. For example, all of the months in a year were borrowed from English, but none of them are pronounced exactly like the months are pronounced in English. Similarly, definitions of some terms have changed since the words were borrowed. For example, the roof is the ceiling of a room in Hindi, but roof is the top of a building in English.

As mentioned earlier, most South Asian languages fall under the Indo-European language family, the largest language family in the world. Here is a map of where all of those languages are. Notice how the northern half of India is included in the family, while the Dravidian languages are separate.