Standardized Grammar of Naga Pidgin

The Central Institute of Indian Languages is entrusted with the responsibility of developing Indian languages by assisting their use in education, administration and mass communication. This task is more challenging for the tribal and other minor languages because of socio-political as well as linguistic reasons. Linguistically, in many cases the work will have to start with the codification of the languages at the lowest level like development of a writing system, selection of a standard variety for it etc. This is to be followed up by preparation of grammars, dictionaries and instructional materials. The Institute has done this kind of work in the past decade and a half for about 50 tribal and minor languages.

The population of the speakers of tribal and other minor languages being small, the tyranny of number often goes against their development. When an area is heterogeneous with many minor languages, more problems are added for their use in education. In such heterogeneous linguistic situations, normally a lingua franca may exist for inter group communication and it may be a pidgin, a nativised version of the dominant Regional Language or some other exceptional language like these. These languages generally have a low social status, but have high educational potential.

Codification of such languages is the first step towards increasing their acceptability and their use in formal domains. The socio-linguistic work of the Institute on such languages has also this application objective in view. The grammar of Naga Pidgin is one effort in this direction, which follows an earlier sociolinguistic study of variation in Naga Pidgin.

The linguistic variation, which is a normal characteristic of Pidgins, adds additional problems for their codification in that the standardisation has to be done by the linguists in the absence of an naturally evolved variety by the community. This grammar of Naga Pidgin attempts at standardization, which is based on certain linguistic principles. We hope that this is acceptable t the speakers of Naga Pidgin.

The Institute has planned to bring out some primers in Naga Pidgin based on the standardised grammar. It is hoped that these efforts will provide a solution to the problems of planning language use in Nagaland.

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