Sadri, also known as Sadani and Nagpuri, is an Indo-Aryan language with an extensive literature and vibrant literary traditions. It is spoken in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Assam, West Bengal, Nepal and Bangladesh. The present book is a comprehensive grammar of the Sadri language as it is spoken in Jharkhand ("Chotanagpur"), where it also serves as a lingua franca amongst the many tribal groups of the region. Based primarily on recordings of the spontaneous spoken language of native speakers, this grammar provides unique insights into this important regional language, especially as it is spoken in the villages, while also describing the main features of the standard language.
John Peterson is full professor of general linguistics at Kiel University in Germany. He did his PhD in 1998 on the morphosyntax of Pali and his "Habilitation", a postdoctoral degree, in 2007 on the South Munda language Kharia, spoken in Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. He specializes in historical, descriptive, sociolinguistic and formal aspects of South Asian languages from all families.
Sunil Baraik was working on the topic "The Chik-Baraik tribe and its native language" with a UGC-Net-SRF fellowship under the guidance of Dr. Kumari Basanti, ex-head of the Department of Tribal and Regional languages, Ranchi University, Ranchi, when he joined this project on Sadri. He is a member of the Chik-Baraik tribe and a native speaker of Sadri.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Prof. John Peterson and Mr Sunil Baraik's work titled A grammar of Chotanagpuri Sadri: An Indo-Aryan lingua franca of eastern central India. This book is being released as one of the publications in the Descriptive Grammar Series at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru. The Central Institute of Indian Languages was established to assist and co-ordinate the development of Indian languages with the responsibility of bringing together all the research and literary output from the various linguistic streams to a common head and narrowing the gap between basic research and development research in the field of languages and linguistics in India. The research activities of the Institute include descriptions of Indian languages with a view to codifying them and to preparing linguistic output to the educational materials prepared in these languages.
The Institute has started a series in its publication unit to publish descriptive grammars on Indian languages. The present book is one in this series with an aim to provide descriptions of a wide range of languages spoken in India. The first priority of the series is grammars of languages for which detailed descriptions are not at present available. However, the series will include descriptions of other Indian languages with more detailed descriptions of such languages than are currently available. The present book includes a detailed description of the phonological, morphological and syntactic and discourse descriptions of the Sadri language.
I hope this book helps to further our linguistic knowledge of Chotanagpuri Sadri of this country and will be well received by the members of the community and by all other scholars working in this area. I am sure Prof. Jon Peterson and Mr Sunil Baraik would welcome all comments that are directed towards the improvement of the current work.
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