Phonology and sociolinguistics of Kanauji

Abstract

The study focuses on phonology and sociolinguistics of Kanauji spoken in Kanpur Nagar of Uttar Pradesh. Kanauji, takes its name from town of Kannauj– the historic and one of the most ancient cities of India, is one of the major Western Hindi varieties.It has little literature to its credit and that too is not available in written form; some amount of folk literature and folk songs is found and preserved by the people in the form of local oral literary traditions. Kanauji is spoken by more than 9.5 million people in at least six districts in various forms. Despite Kanauji being the mother tongue of millions, today it has a very low identity with no official status or proposed preservation plans. Simons and Fennig (see Ethnologue, 2018) places Kanauji within the cloud of all living languages but in the category 6b-7 of the EGIDS6 scale, which reads that languages in the question is in trouble, and intergenerational transmission of the language is in the process of being broken. A linguistic fieldwork, both recording sessions and questionnaire based survey, was conducted to collect speech and text data from the fifteen villages in the Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh. Text and Speech Data from as many as 15 domains of everyday use of language was collected keeping age, education, gender and their exposure with the Hindi/other languages into consideration using two channels simultaneously: first, by Olympus LS-100 96kHz/24 PCM linear recorder which is outfitted with two built-in 90° stereo condenser microphones, second using Sony Digital Flash Voice Recorder (ICD-PX312). The collected data was then, filtered, transliterated, transcribed and annotated using various tools and software. With the help of text and speech database; phonemic inventory, minimal pairs, vowel sequences, consonant clusters, phonotactics, syllable structure, distinctive features, stress, intonation, etc. of Kanauji were described while comparing similarities and differences with Hindi and other neighboring dialects. Subsequently, various phonological processes such as addition, deletion, phoneme substitution, reduplication, free variation, metathesis, aspiration, deaspiration, nasalization, gemination, lengthening, hypercorrection, labialization, palatalization, deletion, alteration, etc. have been researched and explained in the framework of generative phonology, if required. A detailed account of all these processes using basic examples from Hindi and other neighboring dialects are also presented. The linguistic repertoire of Kanpur Nagar consists of more than a dozen languages and dialects in total making it truly multilingual district. However, institutionally, Hindi or English are the only choices available as a medium of communication in school, colleges, government offices, market, media, cinema, etc., As result, speakers of Kanauji grow up speaking a mix form of codes with different degrees of linguistic competence in each language. Kanauji speakers reflect instances of borrowing, code-mixing and code-switching on different levels of linguistic system. Our research shows that the young speakers of Kanauji show the sign of language shift from Kanauji to Hindi. Whereas old speakers still use Kanauji (as Matrix Language) and occasionally embed the elements from Hindi/English (Embedded Language); In contrast, many young speakers use Hindi (ML) and embed the elements from Kanauji. Questionnaire research survey also concludes that Kanauji speakers reflect negative attitude towards Kanauji. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that till date no major work has been reported which focuses on Kanauji in particular. The study will be a pioneer study for Kanauji of Kanpur and will prove to be a reference point for further research on Kanauji.