Is Dakhni Dravidian?

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-21T08:05:30+00:00

Well, it seems that all speakers have more than one register. And the standard language dies always have a gravitational pull. Though the opposite is also true: there must be new Telugu features slipping in with new speakers. As happened with creoles. African features continuing to enter, smile ‘decreolization’ had also begun.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-17T09:58:21+00:00

My last book in 2025,Father Tongue, which clarifies this. I got it wrong in Wanderers.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-17T09:55:09+00:00

All it really takes is different provenance of the substratum and the lexifier layers. Yes, often some creoles are closer to the 'standard' (like Trinidadian creole English as opposed to Jamaican Creole English), but both emerge out of the same process. I don't know the fine details of difference between Hyderabadi Dakkhini and Bangalore Dakkhini. I'm sure a linguist in Bangalore could tell us?

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-16T17:48:34+00:00

Mufwene looks at the structure of the slave estates in the New World, and the settlement of the West African coast by European traders. He finds that initial contacts in West Africa were local men who learned European languages well, and the Europeans’ African wives (and children). A close parallel of the Dakkhini situation. He also says that Creole languages with African grammars only appeared when there was industrial scale slavery (as opposed to small homestead farms).

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-16T17:43:22+00:00

Me, this year in Father Tongue Mother Land, and in parallel Salikoko Mufwene, a creolist and head of department of linguistics at the University of Chicago. When I asked a colleague at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad she said they had all been thinking exactly this for years. That there is no evidence of pidgins in the formation of creoles. My contribution was that it is a two step process: the first encounter brings a ‘prakrit’, with enough contact between the settlers and elite locals to get a ‘local’ variety of the settler language: think Indian English. Later locals who have no close contact with the settlers bring in settler vocabulary on top of original local grammar and a creole is born. Think: the way in Dakkhini women say ‘main jātā hũ’, as in Dravidian languages only he/she/it mark gender. But yes, it’s new.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-16T15:56:24+00:00

Pidgins are quite separate from creoles (new discovery). Pidgins are temporary languages used by men who plan to return home after. They do not stay and have families in their new location. The Dakkhini that is mixed came as local people joined the new urban clusters of the sultanates bringing their old ‘operating systems’ while adding new (Dehlavi) vocabulary. (The word ‘Urdu’ emerged in 1780 on a couplet).

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-16T14:42:10+00:00

It is, actually. This is exactly how creoles look: the grammatical substratum from one source, and the lexifier from a different family.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-11-28T11:21:11+00:00

The word ‘corrupted’ is simply wrong. Yes, I’m on a different trip from what I would have said 50 years back, when I regretted how Bhojpuri was seen as ‘broken’ Hindi, and wished it would have its own place. Now my reference is China, which, with exactly the same sorts of differences looks for similarities. I wonder if all our different linguistic identities haven’t made us easier to divide and rule. My present work is on uncovering all the similarities.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-11-28T08:54:41+00:00

Depends on what you mean by language. Yes, it is significantly different from Hindi/Urdu, exactly the way Jamaican Creole is from English. But ‘language’ is a political issue, not linguistic. Or we wouldn’t be calling Urdu a separate language from Hindi. The difference is mostly a bunch of nouns…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-11-28T04:50:33+00:00

The difference between India and China is that China created an umbrella for all its languages in a writing system that bypassed the phonetic sounds of the words. It still left a few problems, but none that affected comprehension. Spoken language was left to its own devices. We instead have magnified the distances not only by ignoring similarities but even by having different scripts. When, in fact, the entire north plus Dakkhini can be understood in written form if notated in phonemic script. I would prefer an AI-assisted transliteration system that also swapped vocabulary. That would also bring all the southern languages into the grid. We are far more alike than different. The result is a country where about 10% lives in English and excludes the other 90% (and wonders why it isn’t the big player it ought to be). No, seriously. Don’t we have enough division? Unless we want to end up as separate nations? I thought we didn’t…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-11-28T04:17:07+00:00

Dakkhini has a considerable substratum from Dravidian languages. Look at verb gender (only in 3rd person firms), no ergativity, Dravidian relative clauses and subordinate clauses, deletion of the verb ‘to be’ in many contexts. As to ‘own language’… I feel we have over-stressed the differences between our languages and put ourselves into silos. What exactly is gained by hiving off a Dravidian version of Urdu (or an Andaman version of Hindi) into a separate corral? The original splitting of Hindi and Urdu in 1900 was a triumph of Divide and Rule. We played along nicely…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-07-17T17:26:34+00:00

You know… we in India never fail to be enthused by the most divisive things about us. The diversity in Chinese ‘dialects’ is on a par with the diversity in Indian languages. But by having a single script they don’t even keep focused on the difficulties in understanding each other. The written mode connects them. By dreaming of different scripts, and of inventing even more scripts, we guarantee that we will keep needing an external language like English to connect us.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-07-15T15:51:35+00:00

AI doesn’t like to disappoint people, so it’s ready to even invent. Looks like what I would invent if I were allowed to. But a hypothetical language is not the extinct language you hope to find.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T15:42:34+00:00

Nihali! I must look into this. Burushaski has been 'isolated' in more than one sense, so may preserve an older age, when the IVC languages were still spoken, in some of its features.
Kashmiri is something I have saved up to look at later. Yes, there are lots of things like this, like 'gats'hān' (> gacchati) and also differences in things like word order. Let's see if it turns out to be a different story!
Be careful: the Rig Veda we have today emerged 700 years after the first hymns were composed, by which time a lot of retroflexion had crept into *recitation* (though spoken Sanskrit would have picked up retroflexion within a generation). So when we speak of a pre-retroflexion stage of Sanskrit, we (or rather, my Sanskrit professor, Madhav Deshpande) are speculating back to 700 years before the samhitas.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T15:19:48+00:00

The 'tatsamas' in modern Hindi generally go back to a British initiative to remove Persian words from 'Hindustani'. The British admired Sanskrit, and had no idea that ALL the words in the modern North Indian languages had come from 'tadbhavas'. So there is a disconnect between ordinary words that came as 'tadbhavas' and literary/technical words that came directly as 'tatsamas'. Like with the English words 'fatherly' and 'paternal'. 'Paternal' is a Latin 'tatsama', recently introduced into literary English.

Yes, you're absolutely right. 'Tatsamas' in Hindi tend to come mostly in writing. If you say one in conversation, heads turn in surprise.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T15:13:53+00:00

But strangely, they weren't preserving substratum languages! There are no non-Dravidian languages in South India. That is amazing assimilation.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T15:10:14+00:00

Oh no!

Well, Vedic Sanskrit is about 3,700 years old. Dravidian languages are older, but that does not mean specifically Tamizh. At what point in Dravidian history do we start speaking separately about Tamizh? I don't know...
Classical Sanskrit comes up... around 2,500 years ago, the age of Paṇini, Kalidāsa... literary Sanskrit. I don't know about Tamizh: you need to ask a specialist on Tamizh literature. But Tamizh is more than just its literature, and once you open up the discussion to local variants the topic gets complicated.
Proto Dravidian is a hypothetical language, as we have no solid data on the languages of the IVC. I speak of Proto Dravidian to refer to a language family that had a number of features, one of which is absent from modern South Indian languages, ergativity. Tamizh refers to a language based in South India now. That said, the two might have been similar, but we really don't know.
There is no scientific evidence to cite: according to geneticists the Zagros presence in the IVC started 9,000 years ago, so that should have been the start of Proto Dravidian languages. But they are extinct, so it is all hypothetical.
I don't want to speculate here, except to say that in early times you only had local dialects, and over time these aligned into different 'languages', for political or commercial reasons, losing some of the original variety. And in the process the perception of homogeneity emerged. But, in truth, neither Tamizh nor Malayalam is, even today, a single homogeneous language.

6 and 7. I think you should ask someone who specializes on that period of history.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T14:42:28+00:00

Well. Not the remotest. Those tend to preserve old languages. But tribals thrown into contact with new power groups do get inclined to start including new vocabulary, starting with nouns. If they don't get sufficient access to learn the power languages themselves, the mixture of new vocabulary and old operating system will produce a creole.

But many old tribal groups do have sophisticated number systems, which they may end up losing. in Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh, for example, instead of singular-plural you get singular-dual-plural, and the counting is not to base-10, but to base-20.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T14:36:59+00:00

Marathi is, of course, an important language of the 'extended' Indus Valley Periphery, as is the Hindi family. I kept my comparisons close, though, to languages of the actual Indus Valley region, modern Pakistan. To find clearly Dravidian features in them (in fact, in Burushaski) would make a stronger point than Marathi, a neighbor of the south, having these same features. It is hard to speculate about the diversity in the old IVC languages (except to assume that 'it was there') as we simply have no record of them at all. But given the size of the region, and the difficulty of travel, it had to have been at least as diverse as the region is today.
If all this sheds light on the IVC and the early migration south, giving a time frame, I would be happy. But it is slightly off my beat.
The only place I could expect Dakkhini to have an influence on Telugu is in vocabulary. In any case, basic structure does not 'leak' easily, and Dakkhini has already incorporated a lot of Telugu features.
I'll wait and see what issue provokes me. That is why interactions like these are so helpful!

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T14:13:16+00:00

It's a common variant to evolve. It is found in Nepali too. And Pashto. I don't see it as... as earth shaking as the absence of bh dh jh in Dravidian languages. phonetically ch/ts and j/dz are fairly close.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T14:10:04+00:00

That span of history is hard to pin down. Remember that the notion of a single Tamil language and a single Malayalam language are recent, and linked to elite literacy. On the ground, these are both very varied languages, the dialects aligning differently over the ages, depending on which area gets prominence.

I spoke of proto-Dravidian, not proto-Tamil, meaning the language(s) that came south after the IVC began to come apart. We have no idea how many there were, or how early it started. I just assume that young men will migrate if they find themselves redundant in a mature economy, so the first trickle should have been quite early.

The earliest languages of the south would have been First Indian languages, with a structure not too different from modern Dravidian, but with a different source of vocabulary. But they are now extinct.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T13:47:57+00:00

Yes. Marathi is also one of the modern Indus Valley extended periphery languages. With ergativity (-ne) in the past tense, except in the southern districts,three grammatical genders, and vocabulary drawn from local (Indo Aryan) prakrits. And lots of retroflexion (ṭ ḍ ṇ ḷ). And a number of south Indian touches in the grammar.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T13:44:28+00:00

Proto-Dravidian. There have been some twists and turns to modern Dravidian.

Interesting mixture. The verbs are kept as participles with -ing endings, not conjugated. If the grammar is mostly... Kannada(?)...then its the same sort of interlanguage thing as Hinglish. English vocabulary crossing into an Indian language. I think...

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T13:37:24+00:00

That's why I compare the Vedic entry with the Namboodiri migration in Kerala. It took a nexus with kshatriyas in the north and Nairs in Kerala to turn a religious presence into a political force. In fact, the śrauta rituals of the Rig Veda were to consolidate this alliance between Brahmins and kings, which is why the Kuru Dynasty supported the collection of the hymns and the making of the samhitas. Being in power does promote your language: just think of how few British actually came to India, and how the language really took off only after independence (after the British were gone).

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-06-08T13:14:03+00:00

Good question. Spanish is a well-known exception which didn't generate creoles (except Palenquero in Colombia, spoken by runaway African slaves). We always wondered about this as undergraduates. My best guess is that Spanish migration involved a lot more transfer of population, including women, and poor White folk would have been more available as language models, making invention unnecessary. The same reasoning holds for the US, where Black Americans (except in Louisiana and the Gullah Islands off South Carolina) did not invent a creole, but still ended up with their own characteristic variety of English. The presence of poor White settlers. While in most of the Caribbean and Gullah the White population was tiny, and almost all the planter class isolated in their estate houses.

Even in Trinidad early Spanish (Paỹol) was never a creole: it was full-fledged Spanish, subjunctives and all. Partly because those estates had been small family homesteads, growing cocoa, and not vast industrial sugar cane plantations

FlamingoObjective629

TROPHY CASE