Indus Kohistani is a major language of the Dardic group of Indo-Aryan languages. It is spoken in North Pakistan along the west bank of the Indus. The Dardic languages are - in the words of the eminent linguist R.L. Turner - linguistically of great interest. They are of crucial importance for our understanding of the early stages of Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) and of its prehistory. The dictionary contains around 8.000 entries, many of which are supplemented with parallels from other languages (Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Dravidian, etc.), and with information about their origin. The book is presently the most comprehensive dictionary of a Dardic language and a rich source for linguists and South Asian philologists.

The Shina language is a Dardic speech spoken in the mountainousregions of the upper Indus River and its tributaries in Pakistan and India, an area which extends more than eight hundred kilometers from east to west and three hundred kilometers from north to south - an area larger than Norway. It is divided into three major dialects: the Gilgiti, Kohistani and Astori. Until now, only the Gilgiti dialect has received the attention of scholars; this work is the only grammar of the Kohistani dialect, as well as the ? rst modern grammar of any Shina dialect.Table of contents: PrefaceMapList of Abbreviations1. The Geographic and Historical Setting2. The Sound System3. Nouns and Postpositions4. Pronouns and Deixis5. Adjectives6. Verbs7. Adverbs, Participles and Verbal Nouns8. Compound Verbs9. ConjunctionsBibliographyInde

Volume 1 of A Grammar and Dictionary of Indus Kohistani contains around 8.000 lemmata, many of which are supplemented with parallels from adjacent dialects, from other Dardic, from Nuristani, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Dravidian and Munda languages, and from Burushaski. The lemmata have been, wherever possible, provided with information about their origin, and they are connected by numerous cross-references. Since Indus Kohistani is a pitch accent language with complicated rules governing the behaviour of the two pitch accents in compounding, derivation, and inflexion, the lemmata are not only marked with their appropriate pitch accents, but the behaviour of the accents (change of value, shift) is illustrated with a large number of inflected forms and cross-references. And since Indus Kohistani has a rich (and frequently irregular) inner and outer conjugation, most verbs are provided with many finite and participle forms. In addition, the dictionary contains two indexes (English - Indus Kohistani and Old Indo-Aryan - Indus Kohistani), and lists with place and clan names, names of the months, etc.

The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by at least 700 million people throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands. They have a claim to great antiquity, with the earliest Vedic Sanskrit texts dating to the end of the second millennium B.C. With texts in Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan, this language family supplies a historical documentation of language change over a longer period than any other subgroup of Indo-European. This volume is divided into two main sections dealing with general matters and individual languages. Each chapter on the individual language covers the phonology and grammar (morphology and syntax) of the language and its writing system, and gives the historical background and information concerning the geography of the language and the number of its speakers.

With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.

This grammar provides a grammatical description of Palula, an Indo-Aryan language of the Shina group. The language is spoken by about 10,000 people in the Chitral district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. This is the first extensive description of the formerly little-documented Palula language, and is one of only a few in-depth studies available for languages in the extremely multilingual Hindukush-Karakoram region. The grammar is based on original fieldwork data, collected over the course of about ten years, commencing in 1998. It is primarily in the form of recorded, mainly narrative, texts, but supplemented by targeted elicitation as well as notes of observed language use. All fieldwork was conducted in close collaboration with the Palula-speaking community, and a number of native speakers took active part in the process of data gathering, annotation and data management. The main areas covered are phonology, morphology and syntax, illustrated with a large number of example items and utterances, but also a few selected lexical topics of some prominence have received a more detailed treatment as part of the morphosyntactic structure. Suggestions for further research that should be undertaken are given throughout the grammar. The approach is theory-informed rather than theory-driven, but an underlying functional-typological framework is assumed. Diachronic development is taken into account, particularly in the area of morphology, and comparisons with other languages and references to areal phenomena are included insofar as they are motivated and available. The description also provides a brief introduction to the speaker community and their immediate environment.

Above and Beyond the Segments presents a unique collection of experimental linguistic and phonetic research. Mainly, it deals with the experimental approach to prosodic, and more specifically melodic, aspects of speech. But it also treats segmental phonetics and phonology, second language learning, semantics and related topics. Apart from European languages and dialects (including Dutch, English, Greek, Danish, and dialects from Italy and The Netherlands) there also are chapters on regions as widespread as China, Russia, South Africa, South Sudan, and Surinam. These all testify the enormous diversity of language and speech in the world. This book is of special interest to linguists working on prosodic aspects of speech in general and to those studying non-Western languages in particular.