Kurmali, is a lesser-known, under-studied and under-analyzed Indo-Aryan language spoken in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Jharkhand, Assam and West Bengal. Most of the languages that are in the Eighth Schedule get substantial state funding, and scholars writing in the language find their work recognised by the Sahitya Academy for awards. These languages therefore have a significant number of books, literature, textbooks, scientific research, dictionaries, newspapers and magazines to their credit. The same cannot be said of languages such as Kurmali that are not recognized in the Eighth Schedule: one does not find a very encouraging state of affairs.
Language retention and use by the speakers of a minority language becomes one of the major issues, because of the domination of major languages such as Hindi and English. These are the languages taught in schools, and used in the public domain. Since it is either Hindi or a local scheduled language that provides greater job opportunities, students prefer to learn either English and/or the local scheduled language and they either totally ignore their mother-tongue or have a very minimal knowledge of it.
In such a scenario, any work on a language such as Kurmali or any other non-scheduled language is welcome. The researchers from the 'Endangered and Indigenous languages India' project from Jadavpur University have made a sincere effort by attempting to collect data for their dictionary in the various domains of usage of Kurmali following well-established techniques of data collection. Such a dictionary would be of immense help in the preparation of teaching materials, for language learning and language standardisations etc. A dictionary can preserve specific items that are in use at present but may become obsolete due to changing technologies or modernization. An urban speaker of Hindi or Urdu, for example, might not be aware of a word such as ban [ar], the thick thread or thin rope that is used in a traditional cot in India. In my view, the job of the lexicographer is to bring such expressions to public knowledge by presenting them in her/his dictionary. This would not only be a great help in language preservation, but would also remind a speaker of the traditional modes of living in a specific period.
I would like to see more work done on this dictionary and I hope the research group comes with a larger version of a Kurmali dictionary.
The Dictionary of the Kurmali language is an outcome of the first fieldwork done by the project team of the University Grants Commission (UGC) sponsored project on "To Study and Research on Indigenous and Lesser Known Languages of India During The XII Plan Period" (SRIELI) under the School of Languages and Linguistics at Jadavpur University. The project began in April 2016. The first fieldwork on Kurmali language spoken in the district of Purulia of West Bengal was conducted in February-March 2017. The dictionary contains 1017 words of Kurmali or Kudmali and an appendix covering the local names for flora, fauna, counting system, festivals observed by the community. The entries contain information related to pronunciation, gloss in three languages (Bangla, Hindi and English). This dictionary is a first attempt to list the lexical items of the variety of Kurmali spoken in Purulia. We have found nasalised segments in some cases albeit it is not phonemic. Since we were aware that Bangla is the dominant language of this region, we have kept the headwords in Bangla along with Hindi in Devanagari script (given the Kurmali spoken in the neighbouring Jharkhand uses Devanagari). Thus this dictionary will help the speakers of this vast region to learn and recollect words of Kurmali in an efficient manner. To give it a global perspective and increase its research potentials further, we have used the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for the headwords. This will help linguists to learn and carry out further research on this language.
The dictionary captures lexical variation and often example sentences are corroborated with the headwords. The dictionary contains encyclopedic information, pictures (some of which were taken during the fieldwork) and also a brief note on the Kurmi community. The dictionary also contains additional information such as the names of the months, days, numbers and a few essentials like names of trees and kitchen items in the language.
I hope the readers will enjoy reading this book and gain insights about the Kurmali words and in the process get to know about the Kurmi community of Purulia, West Bengal. I feel that this dictionary will be a valuable contribution to the Kurmi community and useful for the Kurmali people and also to the members of other communities, research scholars and linguists. I welcome all kinds of comments, feedback and suggestions from the readers.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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