We are pleased to officially announce that we have received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation Linguistics Program. The project is entitled “Sora Typological Characteristics: Towards a Re-Evaluation of South Asian Human History” and is funded by grant award NSF/BCS #1844532. We are grateful for the support and excited about this undertaking!
The Principal Investigator of this project is Living Tongues Director, Dr. Greg Anderson, and the co-PI is Living Tongues Senior Director in the Asia-Pacific region, Dr. Mark Donohue. Furthermore, the grant includes indigenous scientists such as Dr. Bikram Jora, Dr. Luke Horo and Opino Gomango in key research roles.
This project will provide a comprehensive study of the Sora language, spoken by an indigenous ‘tribal’ people in India with a population of over 300,000. The Sora homeland is located in several districts of southern Odisha State and adjacent parts of northern Andhra Pradesh, with significant clusters in diaspora communities in Assam, Tripura and West Bengal. All of those regions have distinct dialectical zones that we will survey in this study.
We will focus on the features of Sora’s sound system, grammar and vocabulary which stand out in various significant ways, both from related languages and other languages of the region. These analyses will inform (and be informed by) current debates in language contact and language change in the South Asian and Southeast Asian regions, as well as by current work in linguistic typology, and may necessitate a reformulation of the prehistory of South Asia.
Sora presents several challenging features, including a possibly unique form of noun incorporation that has been explicitly predicted to be impossible. Once these details of Sora are better understood, and its changes over time have been analyzed, new insights into the murky linguistic pre-history of South Asia will emerge. The project also offers unique opportunities for indigenous scientists to play major roles in the research as key team members, thus offering capacity building and STEM field research opportunities to some of the most underserved and underrepresented communities of scientists. It also helps promote the visibility of indigenous peoples whose histories have been missing from mainstream accounts of regional South Asian history.
The project will produce A Grammar of Sora (with texts, a comparative lexicon and grammar of the various Sora dialects) and create an exhaustive, annotated archival deposit of the Sora dialect materials. These are to be collected through a combination of spontaneous narrative recordings and targeted elicitation with speakers, recorded in audio and video format. Topics to be explored include the ‘expressive’ lexicon, which is a highly developed system in Sora with many attested complex reduplication patterns, as well as the systems of grammatical agreement seen in different verb classes.
We will also examine the typological shifts that may have accompanied the Dravidian and Aryan migrations into South Asia that marginalized the groups already there, such as the Proto-Munda ancestors to the Sora, and the ancestral language to Kusunda to the periphery. These typological shifts may have submerged or replaced what may have been more widespread older features.