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Bilingualism and syntactic change in Konkani

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Mangesh V. Nadkarni
Mangesh V. Nadkarni*
Affiliation:
Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India
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Abstract

The syntax of the relative clause in the Saraswat Brahmin dialect of Konkani, an Indo-Aryan language, has been virtually Dravidianized because of the impact of the Dravidian Kannada language, operating through bilingual speakers. Konkani has two versions of the relative clause—a native Indo-Aryan type, and a borrowed Kannada type; the latter is gaining predominance at the cost of the former, which has come under various kinds of constraints. The mechanism of this syntactic change is examined here. The peculiar features of the Konkani–Kannada bilingual situation are described, and an attempt is made to provide an explanatory account of the syntactic change in Konkani.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 1975, pp. 672 - 683
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 Linguistic Society of America

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References

Emeneau, M. B. 1956. India as a linguistic area. Lg. 32.3–16.Google Scholar
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Nadkarni, M. V. 1970. NP-embedded structures in Kannada and Konkani. Los Angeles: UCLA dissertation.Google Scholar