We feel privileged to grab the opportunity of this special issue of Vaak Manthan to publish the manuscripts obtained from the two-day National Seminar on ‘India as a Linguistic Area: Exploring Shared Features Across Language Families’ (ILAESFALF -2025), organised by the Centre for Linguistics, SLL&CS, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The Biannual, bilingual peer-reviewed E-Journal is an offshoot of the Society for Endangered and Lesser-Known Languages. Thus, we bring to this issue a selected list of manuscripts dealing with convergence, language contact, and more significantly the typological features of lesser-known languages.

We see that in a multilingual country where a region or a district is a habitat of diverse communities, language convergence or contact-induced features are adapted by the speakers of varied languages resulting in structural similarities. Rastogi provides us with a broad linguistic landscape of Uttarakhand, and throws light on the broader patterns and implications of language contact in marginalized and multilingual settings of two Tibeto-Burman languages – Jad and Raji; and aims in contributing to how the nature and extent of contact-induced convergence has significantly affected the linguistic identities of its communities, and at the same time showing different sociolinguistic trajectories.

Padhan attempts a sociolinguistic study by exploring an evolving morphosyntactic structure of Sundargarh Sadri in the context of the usage of enclitic marker -har in inalienable possession in two different age groups – adult and children’s speech, and its interaction with the neighbouring languages. The study contributes to the language variation and contact owing to the influence of the regional languages – Odia, Sambalpuri, and Hindi. Both the Sadri varieties Sundargarh and Jharkhand show deviation from the original nature, simplifying and reducing the distinction of alienable-inalienable possessive system, to be at par with the neighbouring regional languages. However, the usage of -har varies in different regions. The study further investigates phonological and morphological variations which states deeper patterns of contact-
induced change.

The language families show convergence in a couple of morpho-syntactic features yet showing specificity in certain functions. Jakhar exhibits phonological processes in pluralization of Bagri that shows variation with Standard Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages. The author elaborates with plural examples of vowel lengthening, tonal variation, epenthesis, gemination, degemination, voicing of voiceless consonants, reduplication, among many others.

Reduplication is regarded as an essential grammatical criterion found across all language families -Indo Aryan, Tibeto Burman, Dravidian, Austro Asiatic, and Tai Kadai. Kopparapu and Sankar contributes to the evaluation of Reduplicative meanings which manifests intensification, distribution, and iteration, capturing cross linguistic patterns in Indo Aryan, Dravidian, Munda, and Tibeto Burman languages. This is done by positing a R-D semantic model comprising Reduplicator (R), Iterator (I), and Distributor (D) and grounding their effects in binary time/space features of morpho-syntactic categories – nominals, verbs, adpositions, and modifiers. Lal and Ray demonstrate Reduplication in Bagri adopting Goldsmith’s Auto segmental framework which reveals that Complete, Echo, and Numeral reduplication is governed by a systematic phonological phenomenon showing distinct manipulation of independent phonological tiers. Naha illustrates Reduplication in Kokborok with examples from Expressives, Echo formation, Complete, Partial, Discontinuous, Semantic Reduplication, and Reduplication as iconic form-meaning mapping.

The characteristic typological features of languages manifest the interesting grammatical patterns and the nature of human languages. This also brings to the understanding of the formation of the grammatical (or phonological) concepts, functions and markers, and their intermediacy to geographical and pragmatic factors. Thus, in Trans-Himalayan languages, topographical deixis is an essential grammatical function; Tibeto-Burman languages exhibit restricted temporal functions; Dravidian languages lack in lexical adjectives, the Austroasiatic languages show predominance of sesquisyllables; Tai Kadai languages are tonal in nature.

In this volume, Nikhilesh demonstrates a typological morphosyntactic feature of Dravidian languages in general, and Telangana Telugu in particular. The paper elaborately focuses on how these languages lacking in lexical adjectives compensates with the formation of Property Concept expressions derived from nouns and verbs through copula and relative clause morphology, and operates in attributive modification positions. Ronald investigates the structure and phonological function of sesquisyllables in Khasi, making a departure from classical Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), and evaluating the rich onset clusters using the Beats and Binding (B&B) theory and Baroni’s Net Auditory Distance (NAD) model. Doley discusses in detail the case marking system in Pagro Mising, representing the Eastern Tani branch of the Tibeto-Burman family. The study makes note of the fact that ablative marker is derived from the merging of locative and genitive cases in Tani languages. Majee’s work entails interesting patterns of negative particles, negative clitic and negative copula in Kumaoni. The Present Tense form of verbs brings to the surface the usage of negative copula and negative clitics which reasonably hints to pragmatic significance of the discourse. Sen provides formal syntactic analysis to investigate how verbs in Kumaoni license arguments
syntactically and interacts with the morpho-syntactic processes, using the theoretical models.

A language can be categorized on the basis of the property of word formation. Some languages like Mandarin or Tai Khamti are mono-morphemic where each morpheme is a content word and a free word form. Other languages differ in varying degrees in the affixation processes or bound forms eg., in Nyishi, biŋ- co- ja- mu- tarine (speak-first-wait-let-FUT) ‘let you speak first’. While in certain languages morphological affixations are identified, in other languages affixations are opaque. In addition, languages coin new words to keep pace with the evolution of mankind, development of new ideas, objects, or social phenomena. Teronpi, Yimchunger, and Som explores Neologisms across the North-East Indian languages – Yimkhiung, Bodo, Mizo, Lotha, Karbi, Ao, Simtee and Khasi through the process of Compounding, hybridization, blending, loan words, calque, coinage, and metaphorical extension. The work examines the conceptualisation of neologism, the word structures and semantic functions. Deka and Nath contributes to a documentation of the word formation processes of Zyphe or Zophei, language which belongs to the Maraic branch of the Kuki-Chin group of the Tibeto-Burman Language
Family, data collected from Siata and Iana, two remote villages of the Saiha district of Mizoram.

This issue also contributes to the problems of the introduction of the indigenous languages in the school curriculum. Talukdar and Nath explore the hurdles and challenges faced in translating and creating effective school materials for the Rabha and Tiwa languages under Assam’s Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) program, gathering primary data from the two major regions: Goalpara district (for Rabha) and Morigaon district(for Tiwa).

Singhania and Ray illustrates that the sociolinguistic profile of Magahi, originated from Magadhi Prakrit. Despite its appreciable demographic size and rich oral tradition which can trace back to the administrative language of Emperor Ashoka, there is an urgency for the policy interventions and community efforts to preserve and revitalize the language.

Finally, Ray subsumes the present volume with an exhaustive account of the notions of ‘language’, ‘standard language’, ‘dialect’ and the cultural hegemony of the ruling elites. He provides rational understanding of how the minorities are severely sabotaged by the ruling elites with their prescribed notions of ‘standardization’, and their cultural and religious ideologies.

The special issue contributes to data-based analysis attempted on diverse languages, addressing a wide variety of research questions, hurdles & challenges of translating education materials, theoretical models, linguistic peculiarities and impregnable fluidity of languages which converges into India as a linguistic area.