The Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture has been set up with the express purpose of modernising the Marathi language as a part of the Central Government's programme for modernising the regional languages. While framing and pursuing its multilateral programme for the enrichment of Marathi literature, the Board found that, like the literature in all the other regional languages in India, Marathi literature is singularly deficient in books on scientific subjects including subjects coming under the category "Humanities". It is not, therefore, surprising that books dealing with linguistics in general and a scientific analysis of the Marathi language, in particular, including its phonetics, grammar, etymology, etc. have been almost wanting in the whole gamut of Marathi literature.
While the State Board does not expect to work miracles overnight in a field neglected by the Marathi writers for so many years past, a modest beginning has been made by the State Board by undertaking publication of standard books on many varied scientific subjects like Eugenics, Dietetics, Anatomy, Medicine, Statistics, Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Zoology, Botany and others. Efforts are also being made to get standard books on linguistics translated into Marathi by eminent scholars.
It is The Marathi language is rich in linguistic and cultural heritage constituted by its host of dialects. considered by scholars of linguistics that an analytical study of a selected number of Marathi dialects will afford broad points of reference for dialectal studies and linguistic surveys of a more comprehensive nature. Their study will also open the door for the study of local culture and folk literature. Such an analytical study is thus very important and also urgent because the local dialects which constitute the worthy heritage are fast disappearing owing to the spread of literacy in standard Marathi as well as the wide circulation of dailies, weeklies and other periodicals in standard Marathi. It has, besides, a great scientific value for linguistic studies in Maharashtra and for the wider field of Indian languages.
With the full help and co-operation of the Linguistics Department of the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, Poona, the State Board has undertaken the scheme for a scientific survey of the Marathi dialects and, initially it is intended to study, in fair detail, some seven or eight dialects of Marathi according to the modern methods of descriptive analysis so as to give a fairly good picture of the dialects themselves as wholes. Dr. A. M. Ghatage, a Member of the State Board is conducting the dialectal survey on behalf of the Board. The Kudāļi dialect is his second work in the dialectal survey series.
The name Kudali is given to the dialect of Marathi which is spoken in the small town of Kudal and the area around it which includes towns like Savantwadi, Vengurla and Malvan, all in the southern part of the district of Ratnagiri, Linguistically this dialect stands midway between the Końkaņi dialects of Goa and Karwar and the so called Konkan Standard spoken in the northern parts of Ratnagiri district and further to the north along the western coast. In the north this form of speech merges into the dialect of the north. Though the dialect is fairly uniform, homogeneous and intelligible over the whole area, there are minor differences of a local nature and differences due to the social status of the speaker. On the whole we can distinguish between a more sophisticated form of speech of the educated person which is influenced by the standard form of Marathi or by the Konkani of Karwar in case of the Sarasvat cemmunity and the speech of the illiterate persons which is free from such influence and which is likely to represent the local form of speech much more faithfully. But it must be noted that the rapid growth in communication all along the Konkan strip has made the standard form of Marathi known in the remotest village and it has exercised some influence on the speech of the rural population as well.
The speech of the uneducated differs from that of the educated persons mainly in the following respects:-
(1) The uneducated person shows no clear aspiration in the aspirated stops of the educated speaker and often varies freely between aspirated and unaspirated stops. In his normal speech he mostly uses the unaspirated stops.
(2) The nasalization of the vowels in the speech of the uneducated is very weak and often completely absent.
(3) Final voiceless stops /p, t, c, k/ are unreleased and often difficult to be distinguished.
(4) Final voiced stops /b, d, j, g/ are devoiced and become /p, t, c, k/.
(5) There is a good deal of uncertainty in the use of /n/ and /n/ and /d/ and /d/ in many words.
(6) In the final position /a/ and /a/ vary without any rule,
The material presented here is the speech of the common man who has no or very little education. Even then he has picked up a few words of standard Marathi or even English, which could not have formed part of the original form of the dialect. The material was collected at Vengurla and two informants were used, one of about 25 years of age and the other an elderly person of about 55 years. Individual differences among them were not important and the two together helped to give a fairly comprehensive picture of the dialect. More complex constructions and words of abstract nature were absent in their speech and the texts often show a kind of loose syntax in case of the uneducated informants. In a couple of cases the texts were suggested to them from well known stories and in one case a text from the current Marathi reader was used to be put into the form of the dialect. This dialect is not used for writing and hence texts of even mediocre literary value could not be obtained.
The material consists of about 2,000 words, a number of prepared sentences, a number of nominal and verbal paradigms and some ten texts, all orally transcribed, recorded and then checked with the help of the records. To facilitate comparison the bulk of the sentences is kept the same as in the other dialects but the texts are different and in no way tampered with. The major part of the vocabulary will be also found to be identical with that of the other dialects described but again no attempt is made to stick to one invariable list.
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