Original Article

Lexicographical Study of the Axomia Sadri Language:  A Learners’ Dictionary of The Axomia Sadri Language

 

 

INTRODUCTION

The Sadri language used to be a populated language of the Chota Nagpur plateau. It is an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian language family. The origin of the language is in the Chota Nagpur Plateau. It was the language of the Sadans, an Aryan group amongst the non-aryan groups of the Chota Nagpur Plateau Navarangi (1965:5). It was also the lingua franca among the Adivasis living in and around the Chota Nagpur Plateau that spreads over present day Bihar, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and parts of West Bengal and Orissa.

Lexicography is the art and craft of making dictionary. The dictionaries are the repository of words. It helps one in comprehending a language, learning the correct spellings of the words of the language as well as using them in the suitable contexts. The impact of globalization has expanded the scope of inter-community communication, thereby exposing one to languages other than one‟s own native tongue. A Dictionary is an integral part of language learning process. Different types of dictionaries are prepared for serving different purposes at different times. Dictionaries are probably the only resource which can give us the best and most comprehensive information about the words or terminologies of a language or a certain field.

This study primarily attempts to compile “A Learner’s Dictionary of Axomia Sadri” and also to provide a basic grammatical and social sketch of the Axomia Sadri Language and its community. “A Learner’s Dictionary of Axomia Sadri” is a monolingual dictionary which also includes English glosses. Each entry in the dictionary consists of Head Word, Phonetic Form, English Gloss, Word Class, Example of Axomia Sadri and English gloss of the Axomia Sadri example. The dictionary consists of 400 words including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and other lexical parts of speech.

 

Significance of the Study

Language is a distinguishing attribute of individuals. The language of a community serves as the cornerstone of its unique attributes, encompassing culture, history, ceremonies, rituals, and more. Individuals within a community have an identity crisis when their language faces the threat of extinction. A Dictionary can provide a way towards preservation of a language. The researchers' endeavour to investigate the basic grammatical features and social life of the Axomia Sadri language and its community and attempts to compile ‘A Learner’s dictionary of the Axomia Sadri Language’ so that it could help the community in preserving and restoring their language in the present time as well as in the future.

 

Review of Related Literature

During the days of the British Rule, after the discovery of tea plants in Assam, the British officers brought a group of people from the Chota Nagpur plateau area to Assam as labourers in their tea-gardens. They were the native speakers of Sadri language. After settling in Assam, the Sadri people found it difficult to interact with the local peoples of Assam. So, they have to adopt a pidgin which was a combination of Assamese and Sadri. The reason for adopting the pidgin were the difficulties they faced in communication. As a result, the pidgin was gradually adopted as the mother tongue among the tea-tribe community and it became creolized and got the status of a language. The language was used as the lingua franca between the tea-garden labourers and the natives of Assam. The result of this adoption led to the convergence of the Sadri language into Assamese. But it did not converged totally into Assamese and retained some of its phonological, morphological and syntactical features and used to be called a variety of Sadri language, i.e. Axomia Sadri. 

The native speakers of Sadri are found in all parts of Assam. They mostly inhabit in the districts of Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar, Jorhat, Golaghat, Nagaon, Sonitpur and Lakhimpur of Assam. Some of them are also found in parts of Sadia, Kamrup, Goalpara and Kokrajhar districts of Assam. Toppno (1999), states that there are about 845 tea gardens in Assam where Axomia Sadri is spoken and is the mother tongue of the speakers.

The tradition of making dictionary is very old. The traditional lexicography of earlier times was arguably a distinct endeavour from the lexicography based on field work nowadays. Traditional lexicography was based on a massive corpus or earlier dictionaries. It started first in China in the 1st and 2nd century during the reign of Han dynasty. ‘Shuowen Jiezi’ was the first remarkable work on lexicography compiled by Xu Shen which became the foundation for all other subsequent work on lexicography. It was a compilation of the information about the origins, meanings and pronunciations of the Chinese words.

In India, the tradition of making dictionaries began over two thousand years ago. Sanskrit dictionaries and Thesaurus are the evidence of long tradition of native lexicography practices in Indian languages. There are three terms nighantu, kosha and nirukta which are particularly relevant in Indian lexicographic tradition. Nighantu means lexicon and nirukta means explanation. Nighantu gives the explanations of obscure, rare and difficult words found in the Vedic texts for easier understanding of the Vedic texts. Kosha is literally the storehouse which was written in verse in the early time. It contains entries for nouns and in declinable forms but not verbs. The best work among such Koshas is the “Amorkosha” by Amarasinha, a Buddhist scholar.

In medieval Europe, lexicography originated (rather re-invented itself) in the form of compilations of the interlinear vernacular glosses in Medieval Latin. The word “Dictionary” was used as ‘Dictionarous’ meaning “of words‟ in the 13th century by an Englishman John

Garland and the word ‘Dictionarium’ was used in the 14th century. The first English titled Dictionary was ‘Latin-English Dictionary’ by Sir Thomas Elyot (1538). The first monolingual dictionary of English was ‘A Table Alphabetical’ by Robert Cawdrey (1604), consisting of

3000 entries. Samuel Johnson compiled an English dictionary more than hundred years later in 1755 named ‘The Dictionary of English Language’, consisting of over 42000 entries. It was the most comprehensive reference text until the first publication of the great ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ in 1884. There were some other dictionaries in English, published during the 18th and 19th century, namely, James Buchanan’s ‘Linguae Britannicae’ (1757), Thomas Sheridan’s “A General Dictionary of the English Language‟ (1780). Dash (2015)

The word “Lexicography” is derived from the Greek word lexicos means lexeme and graphe means writing. The word lexicography was used in English in 1680. It is an art and craft of making dictionary. It describes the linguistic as well as technical aspects of making a dictionary. A dictionary always depicts the socio-cultural aspects of a community as well as its language. Many scholars have given so many different definitions on lexicography. A few of those are discussed as follows:

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary for Current English (1998), a dictionary is “A book that deals with the individual words of a language (or certain specified class of them) so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification and use, their synonyms, derivation and history, or at least some of these facts; for convenience of reference the words are arranged in some stated order, now in most languages, alphabetical, and in larger dictionaries the information given in illustrated by quotations from literature”.

According to Cornelis Christiaan Berg, “A dictionary is a systematically arranged list of socialized linguistic forms compiled from the speech-habits of a given speech-community and commented on by the author in such a way that the qualified reader understands the meaning […] of each separate form, and is informed of the relevant facts concerning the function of that form in its community” Filipec (1971). 

According to Richard Chenevix Trench, “A dictionary is an inventory of the words of a language (with explanation of meaning and other information)”. (ed. Allan (2013))

 

Rationale and Aims of the Study

An examination of the literature review indicates that the importance of dictionary is immense. It plays a vital role in comprehending a language properly as well as helps in disciplines like literature, culture, education, etc. With time, lexicography is being developing and expanding its scope. In future, hope we will get much developed and modern dictionaries. Nowadays, various softwares are created to compile advanced dictionaries easily. The researcher intends to study the grammatical sketch and the social life of the Axomia Sadri

Language and its community to provide an introduction of the community to the world and provide the community with a compiled dictionary of their mother tongue. A particular focus of this research article is compile a Learners’ Dictionary. The research paper aims to achieve the following:

·        To explore the Axomia Sadri language and its community to study its grammatical features and to provide a gist of the social life of the community.

·        To compile “A Learners’ Dictionary of the Axomia Sadri Language”.

 

Methodology

This study employs the descriptive survey approach, collecting information from both primary and secondary sources. The core data for the study came from the fieldwork that was conducted in the Charaideo, Sivasagar and Dibrugarh districts of Assam, India, specifically in the 3 Tea Estates, namely, Khoomtaie Tea Estate, under Assam Tea Company Limited

(Sivasagar), Hingrijan Tea Estate, under Andrew Yule & Company Limited (Charaideo) and Moran Tea Estate, under Mcleod Russel Group (Dibrugarh). Fieldwork has been carried out based on events that have occurred across all of the available platforms of language usage, including political gatherings, educational institutions, social community functions, public areas, and so on. Secondary data have been gathered from the literary and linguistic works on the Axomia Sadri as well as on the Sadri language and the theme genre that are pertinent to the research issue. These works have been read in order to gather information. The dictionary was compiled with the help of Lexique Pro, Toolbox/Shoebox and PhoTrans Edit softwares. Lexique Pro is an interactive lexicon viewer, with hyperlinks between entries, category views, dictionary reversal, search, and export tools. It can be configured to display your Toolbox/Shoebox database in a user-friendly format so that you can distribute it to others. It’s simple interface allows the user to build a dictionary from scratch rather effortlessly, compared with the cumbersome Toolbox setup. APA 7th edition citation stylesheet has been used throughout the research work. IPA has been used for the transcription purpose.

 

Grammatical Sketch of the Axomia Sadri Language

There are 23 consonant phonemes found in the Axomia Sadri language that contrasts each other in minimal pair sets. Among them are non-aspirated plosive, aspirated plosive, nasal, tap, fricative and lateral. The consonant chart of Axomia Sadri Language is as follows:

 

There are 8 monophthongs and 8 diphthongs found in the Axomia Sadri language. The vowel chart of Axomia Sadri Language is as follows:

 

·        Monophthongs: There are eight monophthongs in the Axomia Sadri language.

These are /i/, /e/, /a/, /ɑ/, /ɔ/, /o/, /u/ and /ə/.

/ i / - gari ‘car’

/ e / - gʰɔre ‘gʰɔr-e’ ‘house-LOC’

/ a / - bagan ‘tea-garden’

/ ɑ / - tɑmɑm ‘ultimate’          / ɔ / - kɔrɔm ‘Korom Puja’

/ o / - oidige ‘that side’ (proximal)

/ u / - u ‘he’

/ ə / - galəbɔn ‘garland’

·        Diphthongs: There are eight diphthongs found in the Axomia Sadri language. These

are /ei/, /ui/, /oi/, /ɔi/, /ai/, /iu/, /ou/, /eu/, /au/, /ia/, /ua/, /ea/.

        / ei / - zakei ‘emphatic marker’     / ai / - zamai ‘Son-in-Law’

        / ui / - mui ‘me’ / ou / - outa ‘that’ (distant)

        / oi / - tʰoila ‘sack’            / ia / - matia ‘brown’

        / ɔi / - bɔhnɔi ‘Co-parents-in-Law’              / ua / - bedʰua ‘widow’ (male)

There are two syllable structures in Axomia Sadri language. They are monosyllabic and disyllabic. The possible syllable structures are as follows:

·        V structure

·        CV structure

·        VC structure

·        CVC structure      

·        VCV structure

·        VCVC structure

·        CVCV structure

·        CVCVC structure

The Axomia Sadri language is an Indo-Aryan language. Like most other Indo-Aryan languages, Axomia Sadri also follows the SOV word order. The verb is in the sentence final position and the object follows the subject. Axomia Sadri language is both agglutinating and inflectional in nature.

For instance,

       S          O          V ram   bagh-ta-ke   marde-l-ek

        Ram.NOM            tiger-CLS-ACC     kill.give-PST-AGR

‘Ram killed the tiger’

The Axomia Sadri language have three tenses; present, past and future. As it is an inflectional language, tense are marked by inflectional suffixes. For example,

·        Present Tense:

 

	mui                       bhat		kha-il-a
	I.NOM                  food  ‘I eat food’		eat-PRS-AGR
	usɔb                      bhat		kha-il-a
	They.NOM          food  ‘They eat food’		eat-PRS-AGR
§	Past Tense:
	mui                       bhat		kha-l-i
	I.NOM                  food  ‘I ate food’		eat-PST-AGR
	usɔb                      bhat		kha-l-ek
	They.NOM          food  ‘They ate food’		eat-PST-AGR
§	Future Tense:
	mui                       bhat		kha-m
	I.NOM                  food		eat-FUT

 

‘I will eat food’

        usɔb       bhat                      kha-b-en

        They.NOM           food       eat-FUT-AGR

‘They will eat food’

The Axomia Sadri language is predominantly an inflectional language with certain amount of agglutinating feature. Inflectional is a morphological feature in which words are formed with the help of inflectional and derivational suffixes. The agglutinating feature is also found in the language where linear sequences of free morphemes are used to form a single word.

For instance,

Verb + suffix	kha-l-ek                eat-PST-AGR		‘ate’
Adjective + suffix	notun-se               new-ADV		‘newly’
Verb + Verb + Suffix	mar-de-l-ek		‘killed’

 

On the basis of the analysis, the grammatical sketch provides us a picture that the phonemic inventory of the Axomia Sadri language consists of 23 consonants; 8 vowels, which are both rounded and unrounded along with 8 diphthongs. The syllable structure of the Axomia Sadri language is disyllabic. It follows the SOV word order. The tense system in Axomia Sadri as it has all the three tenses; present, past and future. Being an inflectional-agglutinating language, words are formed by adding affixes to the root or stem.

 

Social Life of the Axomia Sadri Community

The Tea-garden labourers (Adivasi), with its distinct customs and practices, rituals and social beliefs, is a community with a rich socio-cultural heritage. It has a patriarchal system.

The property of the ancestors is inherited by the male child. Now a days, females are also given equal rights as the male, but still, the male is always preferred than the female. Early age marriage or Child marriage is prevalent in the community.

In Assam, we can find 3 different varieties of Axomia Sadri. It is due to the impact of the dominating language or mostly spoken language of the areas. The variety found in Dibrugarh, Tinsukia and some parts of Sivasagar district is called as Axomia Sadri. The variety found in Jorhat, Golaghat and most of the parts of Sivasagar districts are called as Oriya Sadri. The variety found in the districts of Nagaon, Sonitpur, Lakhimpur, Kamrup, Goalpara and Kokrajhar are called as Puruliya Sadri. The names of these varieties were given by a native speaker and he stated that the variation are divided in terms of lexical borrowing. In Oriya Sadri, many lexical borrowings from the Oriya language are found. Likewise, in Assam Sadri and Puruliya Sadri, lexical borrowings from Assamese and Bengali respectively are found. The language though is used as the lingua franca across the state of Assam, it has variations. For instance, the Axomia Sadri, i.e. the variety spoken in Dibrugarh, Tinsukia and some parts of Sivasagar districts, is different from the Puruliya Sadri, i.e. the variety spoken in the districts of Nagaon, Sonitpur, Lakhimpur, Kamrup, Goalpara and Kokrajhar.

The Adivasi community in Assam has its own traditional cultures and rituals. They primarily celebrate two types of Puja viz. Korom Puja and Tusu Puja. They also celebrate Rongali Bihu, Kongali Bihu, Bhugali Bihu, Durga Puja and Diwali(Kali Puja) as they are now assimilated with the indigenous Assamese community of Assam. A brief account of the primary festivals of the community are as follows:

1)     Korom Puja: Korom is the worship of Korom-Devota, the god of power, youth, and youthfulness. The Korom festival is an agricultural festival. The festival is held on the 11th day of a full moon (Purnima) of the Assamese month of Bhado, which falls between August and September. Groups of young villagers go to the jungle and collect wood, fruits, and flowers. These are required during the puja (worship) of the KoromDevota. The Karam tree, scientifically named Nauclea Parvifolia is the center of the proceedings of the festival. The preparations for the Karam festival begin around ten or twelve days before the festival. During this period, people sing and dance together in groups.

 

2)     Tusu Puja: Tusu Puja is one of the important festivals of the Tea Tribes of Assam. It is celebrated in the Assamese month of Magh, which falls between January and February. They worship Goddess Tusu during this festival. The festival is also celebrated beautifully by the dwellers of the tea gardens of Assam like other folk festivals. During Tusu Puja, sculptures make statues of Goddess Tusu and people beautifully decorate it with mud and flower. Young boys and girls carry the statue from house to house singing and dancing. The young girls of the community dress in their traditional attire and tie handkerchief on their hands and dance with the rhythm of the music and instruments. Goddess Tusu is popular among the tea tribes who symbolize kindness, virtue, love and sacrifice.

 

The Adivasi (Tea-Tribe) community donot have any different type of dress for their day to day life. The females wear Mekhela Sador, Saree, Salwar and now a days they wear western clothes too. The males wear half trousers clubbed with Vests most of the time as they work in the tea-gardens. The youth wears normal dress in their day to day life like Jeans, Trousers, Shirts, T-Shirts, etc. They have their own traditional dress for festivals like Korom Puja, Tusu Puja, etc. The female wear white Saree with Red borders (which they call in their language as “boga sari lal pari”), ornaments and ties a red handkerchief in both of their wrists. The male wear white Kurta clubbed with white dhoti and ties a Gamusa in their head. They wear their traditional attire at the time of performing the Jhumor Dance which is their traditional dance.

 

The Adivasi people are mostly uneducated. In present day, the rate of literacy is increasing but most of the children fail to attain higher studies. The cause behind it is means of livelihood. They work in the tea-garden as daily wage labourers and that is the only source of their livelihood. Once the elder of the house retires from its job, the son or the daughter has to work in place of his/her father or mother to earn livelihood. This is the main reason why children have to leave their studies in the midway. Most of the students are either matriculate or below. There are a few post-graduate and graduate students in their community. The primary occupation of the people is to work as tea-garden labourers. Some of them are also indulged in agriculture, carpentry, business, etc. A few of them have government jobs or private company jobs.

 

A Learners’ Dictionary of the Axomia Sadri Language

This research primarily focuses to compile “A Learner’s Dictionary of Axomia Sadri Language”. “A Learner’s Dictionary of Axomia Sadri” is a monolingual dictionary which also includes English glosses. Each entry in the dictionary consists of Head Word, Phonetic Form, English Gloss, Word Class, Example of Axomia Sadri and English gloss of the Axomia Sadri example. The dictionary consists of 400 words including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and other lexical parts of speech. The dictionary is also colour coded based on different entries. 

The dictionary starts from the next page onwards…

 

 

 

 

 

 

                    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

A dictionary captures the varied and manifold aspects of a language, and is thereby reflective of the concepts, assumptions and the world-view of its speakers. Language, being a representation, invariably carries the abstract and ideational dispositions of the concerned linguistic community. Since the dictionary is the repository of a language’s lexical properties and their semantic possibilities, it has immense importance in documenting and developing a language. 

The Adivasi (Tea-tribe) people of Assam are basically multilingual. In addition to their own language, they speak Assamese, Hindi and Bengali language depending on their different geographical and social context. According to the UNESCO report the Axomia Sadri language is a vulnerable language. Most of the Adivasi people adopted the Assamese language as their mother tongue due to prolonged language contact situation. Assamese language is widely spoken everywhere. Particularly, the urban elites of the Adivasi community have so far exhibited an attitude of negligence and disinterestedness to learn and speak the Axomia Sadri language. Societal factors behind this are: a perceived feeling of inferiority to speak a ‘powerless’ language of a marginalized community, its limited scope in enhancing one’s employability, lack of exposure to environment where the language is ‘alive’, etc. But there are some areas where people are still retaining their language. They have a strong positive attitude towards the language. They use the language at home, work place, informally at schools and colleges, and within their community. The peoples of remote tea- gardens are the ones who are retaining the use of the Axomia Sadri language. Tea-gardens like, Hojua Tea Estate, Moranhat;

Doba Tea Estate, Sepon; Naharani Tea Estate, Sepon; Jamirah Tea Estate, Dibrugarh; Moheema

Tea Estate, Golaghat; are examples of those tea- gardens which are retaining the Axomia Sadri

Language in every possible domain. Although these people will maintain the language in future but some extensive researches should be done on this language for revitalization. It should be try to introduce the language in the primary level schools. 

A dictionary helps in the revitalizing process of a language. It helps the speakers to know the accurate pronunciation, spelling and explanation of the words. It would help the present and future speakers of the Axomia Sadri language by providing them a grasp of the different linguistic aspects of the language, thus offering the scope to revitalize the language.

  

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

None.

 

REFERENCES

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Coward, D., and Grimes, C. E. (1995). Making Dictionaries: A Guide to Lexicography and the Multi-Dictionary Formatter (Version 1.0). The COCOON Platform, University of Paris.

Dash, N. S. (2007). The Art of Lexicography. In Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (225–276). EoLSS Publishers.

Filipec, J. (1971). Manual of Lexicography. Academia, Publishing House of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

Görlach, M. (2010). The Oxford History of English Lexicography. Vol. 1: General-Purpose Dictionaries; Vol. 2: Specialized Dictionaries (Ed. A. P. Cowie). Anglia - Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 127(2). https://doi.org/10.1515/angl.2009.033

Ilson, R. F. (1985). Dictionaries, Lexicography and Language Learning.

Loránd-Levente, P. (2009). Review of The Oxford History of English Lexicography (Vols. 1–2, Ed. A. P. Cowie). Lexikos, 19. https://doi.org/10.5788/19-0-453    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

List of Abbreviations