The genesis and development of Nagamese: Its social history and linguistic structure.
Item
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Title
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The genesis and development of Nagamese: Its social history and linguistic structure.
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Identifier
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AAI9997074
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identifier
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9997074
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Creator
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Bhattacharjya, Dwijen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Edward H. Bendix
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Date
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2001
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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This dissertation provides a grammar of Nagamese and attempts to resolve the controversy over its status.;Centuries ago Nagamese originated in the barter-trade centers of the plains of Assam, in northeastern India, where twenty-one Naga ethno-linguistic groups speaking mutually unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages had to communicate with the Assamese traders and revenue collectors as well as among themselves. The resulting restructured variety of Assamese gradually spread all over the neighboring state of Nagaland. After a long existence as an incipient pidgin, Nagamese probably began to expand sometime after 1881 (Reid 1983 [1942]), when the British Government assumed control of the Naga territory and deployed Assamese policemen and civilian officials in the region, which led to an increase in Naga-Assamese interaction. The process of expansion accelerated in the 1950's when Nagamese was widely used among guerillas fighting for the independence of Nagaland, and the language became instrumental in unifying the linguistically and culturally disparate Naga groups into one political unit with the same aspirations. Nagamese began to expand even more rapidly after Nagaland was granted statehood in 1963. Now free to leave their traditional well-fortified villages without fear, Nagas of all ethnic groups joined the huge multi-ethnic work force that participated in the massive development works that ensued. This unprecedented mobility of the Nagas across the state increased the use of Nagamese as a lingua franca, which in turn forced Nagamese to expand.;It is argued that a creole is a 'prior pidgin' that has become lexically richer and morpho-syntactically complex under mounting pressures to be expressive, that occurs when it becomes the primary or native language of a homogeneous speech community.;Based on reformulated definitions of pidgins and creoles that exclude Bickerton's socio-historical criteria and morpho-syntactic diagnostic features, it is claimed that while the Nagamese spoken by the vast majority of people all over the state is an extended pidgin, the variety spoken by the Bodo-Kacharis of Dimapur, as their primary language, is a creole.;The claims made in this work are supported by historical evidence, and data since the early 1900's.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
