The Central Institute of Indian Languages set up in 1969 is entrusted with the responsibility of developing Indian languages through research training and material production. The Indian languages are at various stages of development from the point of view of the extent of elaboration of their functions and they require different treatments. Development of the tribal languages of the country involves many issues of policy, implementation and academic contribution. Some of them are to be reduced to writing and most of them need codification from the point of view of standardisation, preparation of grammar, dictionary and such other linguistic materials and production of written literature.
One of the primary activities of the Institute relating to its work on tribal languages is writing a grammar. The grammar is not only the first step in the direction of codification of the language but also is a basic material for the teaching and learning of the language. It also provides materials for the typological and areal comparisons for languages and for studies of language universals. The theoretical notions about grammar have changed substantially in the recent decades and many of the notions are to be tested with data from various little-known languages. It is hoped that the grammar series of the Institute will fulfil at least partially these demands from linguists and language planners.
The grammars of various tribal languages, it is hoped, will lead to a handbook of Indian languages, which will be of great use to the students of linguistics in India. India has a long grammatical tradition and it is now absorbing the grammatical models developed in the West. It will be a worthy goal to achieve to develop a grammatical model for the description of Indian languages derived out of both traditional and modern developments.
The tribal people in India have for long lived in isolation except to be exposed for exploitation. They have not participated to their benefit in the socioeconomic development of the country. To come out of their isolation, it is necessary for them to learn the language of the majority people around them and a number of them have done so. But this bridges the communication gap only in one way and the whole burden of building up this bridge is carried by the minority group. It is necessary, however, for developing mutual understanding and good-will, to increase bidirectional communication between the tribal people and the majority of people of the region. For this purpose, the majority people, especially those who come in contact with the tribal people for various reasons such as civil administration, security, social service, trade, etc., should learn their language. The Grammar, which forms part of the package consisting of phonetic reader, bi- or trilingual dictionary and teaching manual is prepared to help them in their learning of the tribal language.
Tibeto-Burman is one among the four language families of India. The other three are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic. Grierson observes that Tibeto-Burman languages stand out as a distinct family as compared with Tai and Chinese (Grierson, 1966, p.5). Tai and Chinese follow the subject-verb-object order whereas Tibeto-Burman languages use subject-object-verb order. The Tibeto-Burman languages are rich in certain areas of vocabulary. For instance, distinct words are found for different kinds of rat, bamboo, basket, etc. in Apatani. There is no grammatical gender. Grammatical categories like case, number, etc., are expressed by free words added after the noun rather than by bound morphemes suffixed to the noun. They are thus like adjectives and follow the head noun.
Grierson classifies the Abor-Miri and Dafla in North Assam group. "The Abor-Miris and Daflas speak dialects which are so closely related that they can justly be considered as one and the same speech form (Grierson, 1966, p.568).
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