Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Contact and Change in J & K Burushaski

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Under the supervision of Dr. Anthony Woodbury, Ms. Sadaf Munshi will conduct fieldwork in India on Burushaski for her doctoral dissertation. This research project studies the influence of neighboring languages, Kashmiri and Urdu, on the variety of Burushaski (JKB) spoken in Jammu and Kashmir in India. The study will produce a linguistic description of this undocumented dialect; a sociolinguistic description of the JKB speech community; and a historical linguistic analysis identifying the borrowings and other historical innovations that distinguish JKB from the Burushaski dialects of Pakistan. It will also explore the ways in which JKB retains features from earlier forms of Burushaski that were lost elsewhere. The study will be done primarily from a text-and-discourse-centered approach which aims to deepen the understanding of the language-culture-society relationship.The data will be digitally recorded on audio- and videotapes for analysis and archiving. By providing an archived corpus of data, the project will provide linguists and anthropologists with a significant corpus for analysis both during and after the project term. It is part of a broader effort to document the world's endangered linguistic diversity, for which Burushaski holds special importance since it is a language isolate, that is, it is not provably related to any other known language or language family. The project will also study social factors that affect both the maintenance of JKB up to now in India, as well as its future prospects. This helps sociolinguists understand the general processes at work in language change, as well as the specific situations that lead to the loss of linguistic diversity. Finally, the documentation and analysis produced by this study will contribute to community efforts at language preservation and maintenance.