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आभ्यंतर (Aabhyantar)
SCONLI-12
विशेषांक ISSN : 2348-7771
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11. Rabha (Kocha Krou) Phonology:
Restructuring the Phoneme Inventory
Garima Chopra : Jawaharlal Nehru University
Abstract: This paper seeks to describe and propose a restructuring of the phoneme
inventory- of both consonants and vowels of the Kocha-Krou dialect of Rabha
language as spoken in North Bengal, India. Credible, multiple works have been
conducted in the past on Rabha Phonology and lexicon. However, the above mentioned works’ focus is on the Rongdani dialect of
the language. The Koch Rabha of North Bengal separated from their original
unified tribe atleast a century ago
Research Objective:This paper seeks to describe and propose a restructuring of the phoneme
inventory- of both consonants and vowels of the Kocha-Krou dialect of Rabha
language as spoken in North Bengal, India. Due to prolonged, close contact of
the native speakers with Bengalipre-eminently and also Rajbangsi and Nepali ,
the reorganization of the sound system of the said language becomes necessary.
An Overview
Migration and location
The densest concentration of tibeto-burmese languages
in India is found in the North-Eastern fragment of the mainland as well as the
northern hilly areas of Bengal, almost fully encircled by Bhutan, Tibet,
Myanmar and Bangladesh. Even by Indian standards, the ethnic heterogeneity and
linguistic diversity in this region is astonishing. We find a long established
and deeply proximal confluence of language communities belonging to two chief
and clearly distinct language families- the Sino-Tibetan and the Indo-Aryan,
the former being the clear majority.
The Rabhas-an identity term which emerged post
Colonization were formerly known as Koch. (From field survey I clearly see that
they believe and identify themselves as Koch. Evidently use of such identity is
found in their own daily life. They introduce their language as Kocha-Krou (
language), song as kocha-chae (chae-song), culture as kocha-alekachar
(alekachar-art), and dance form as kocha-baumani (baumanidance). (Saha, Reboti
Mohan, 198Language Contact Edinburgh) ) This Sino-Tibetan group of people
migrated to the Indian subcontinent along with other Mongolian tribes, arriving
at the Brahmaputra valley in Assam via Tibet. From here, one grpup migrated
towards the far east moving towards south and another group moved towards
Dooars and Cochbihar.
Language diversion and contact
The Rabhas
gradually adapted to the multilingual setting and socio-cultural diversity of
India under Colonial forces which debarred them from living their forest life
in isolation. The Rabhas who adopted cultivation and agriculture as their
primary way of living in the plains developed strong association with Hindus in
the plains of North Bengal. This also made them to learn and speak other
language like Bengali. The multi-lingual surrounding (Bengali, Ranjbanshi,
Sandri) dominated the use of ‘Kocha-Krou’ which is the mother tongue of the
Rabhas owing to social and political supremacy which continues till date.
A significant
divide occurs when two subgroupings are formed through areal contact. In case
of Rabha – the sinosphere by the objective dominance of Tibeto-Burmese
languages and the Indo-sphere by the Indic languages ‘ surrounding led to the creation of the two distinct
dialects- Rongdani of the North East and Kocha-Krou of Bengal. (There are certain features in the
languages of the indosphere that we do not find in the sinosphere, for example,
the presence of retroflexed stops.)
Literature Review: Credible, multiple works have been conducted in the past on Rabha
Phonology and lexicon. These include:
·
Candra Basumatārī , Phukana. The Rabha Tribe of North-East India, Bengal
and Bangladesh .2010.Mittal Publications.
·
The LIS inventory on Rabha by CIIL,Mysore
·
Kondakov, Alexander.A
Sociolinguistic Survey of the Rabha Dialects of Meghalaya and Assam. SIL Electronic Survey Reports ,201Language Contact Edinburgh-016.201Language
Contact Edinburgh.
·
Das, Amrita. Rabha Speech Community- In Colonial and
Post-Colonial Eras.Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN
19Language Contact Edinburgh0-2940 Vol. 17:8 August 2017
However, the above mentioned
works’ focus is on the Rongdani dialect of the language and features of Rabha
as spoken in Assam and Meghalaya have been given sole attention. Many a times
the findings or analyses of the North-Eastern dialects of the language have
been assumed as uniform and projected onto the Koch dialect of it as spoken in
North Bengal too. This raises a serious concern as the Koch Rabha of North
Bengal separated from their original unified tribe atleast a century ago (In
the census report of 1901, there was no mention of the name of Rabha tribe in
the districts of North Bengal and even in West Bengal. In the census report of
1911, the name of the Rabhas came out for the first time) and have since been
in close proximity to Bengali which belongs to an entirely different language
family-Indo Aryan. This has led to significant changes in their sound
structure- with distinct additions, few deletions and a set of alterations in
the phoneme inventory. As can now be inferred, the course of language
development taken by the dialects of Rabha spoken in North-Eastern states must
naturally differ.
Method : Natural language data was
collected from native speakers of Koch Rabha residing in the North Khoirbari
division of Madarihat , Alipurduar district, West Bengal over a period of four
consecutive days. All speakers were bilingual with Bengali being the second
language. Some were multilingual as well with Hindi, Adivasi , English and
Nepali being the other spoken languages. Speech was recorded using Voice
Recording devices and transcribed according to the IPA. PRAAT was also employed
for a better understanding and analysis of sounds obtained.
Framework : The present analysis will be looked through the theories of language
contact studies. Contact-induced changes, or as some scholars like keep it
under the general heading of “borrowing” will be studied in the sub category of
phonetics and phonology. A question in focus will also be whether there is any
fixed order visible in the features being borrowed and if the pattern observed
aligns or deviates away from the commonly adjudged universal constraints on
transfer of elements.
|
Consonants
|
Discussion: As it can be seen that the
consonantal phoneme chart provided does not contain (as opposed to the
northeastern dialects) the bilabial voiceless aspirated plosive, velar
voiceless aspirated plosive, voiced alveolar fricative and the uvular nasal
sounds as phonemes. Rather these sounds are seen to behave like allophonic
variations.
The loss of the uvular nasal
N and voiced alveolar ‘z’can be attributed to the lack of homogenous languages
in contact having similar sounds as opposed to the Meghalaya region. However,
the absence of ‘bh’,’dh’ and ‘gh’ become hard to account for as they are found
aplenty in contemporary Bengali, frequent in the basic lexicon of the source
language. Eg. Ghor (room) or bhorti (fill).This can be seen as a part of the
general loss of aspiration in the present usage of the language.Interestingly,
the addition of a palatal nasal is seen which might be an influence of Nepali
or Rajbangsi which has gradually replaced the uvular of the original Koch.
Examples would be ʌɲəu , rʌɲtap.
Phonological change is often
linked to the borrowing of lexical items. It is a widespread and quite cohesive
claim of contact studies specialists that unless there is some sharing of the
lexicon, other language features cannot be transferred. In other words, lexical
borrowing is the first step of contact. This also seems to be the case in the
present scenario. Words such as ‘pɒde’(after) , sadi ( a piece of clothing) have
been so panoramically borrowed by the natives that eventually the post alveolar
tap ɽ has also enetered the sound system. Natives have been recorded using it
in place of the earlier rolling r. eg. Ghɒɽa (horse).t̪aɽ (star). The difference was noted in the speech of young versus old
speakers. A similar though complex instance was noted in the case of dental and
alveolar stops. The native schoolgoing children were using the alveolar t,d in
place of the dental t̪ ,d̪ . Now Bengali has a phonemic contrast between the two but the voiceless
alveolar was missing entirely from the lexicon of the adult Rabha speakers and
therefore can only be attributed to borrowing from close contact with Bengali.
E.g ɟota (shoes).Furthermore, the contrastive opposition of the voiced dental
stop with their alveolar counterparts seems to be dissolving and changing into
free variation in new generation native speakers.
The bilabial trill is a
phoneme that the language is observed to be gradually losing by changing into
the assimilated form of b and r while the alveolar affricate are sounds that
through influence of Nepali in many natives , becoming part of the speakers’
phonetic variations of ʃ and palatal ɟ respectively.Lastly, it is suggested that the ŋ( velar nasal) symbol incorporates into its
definition ie as its allophone the sound which is a combination of [n] and [k]
in case of languages where k and ɡ are neutralized such as is the case here.
Concerning the vowels it has
been observed that differing from the CIIL findings there is an absence of high̠ back unrounded ɯ and low central unrounded in the data collected here. On the other hand
we discover the distinctive presence of mid̠ open back unrounded ʌ and mid central unrounded sound ə in the inventory. While ʌ has been mainly observed in
borrowed words such as t̪rʌk (truck from English) and dzɑhʌdz (ship from bangla/hindi) “Phonological features such as new phonemes
realized by new phones, but in loanwords only “(Thompson) the positioning of
the schwa is debatable. It can either be seen as a distinct phoneme for a
number of speakers replacing the high central vowel or accommodated as its
allophone.This phone has also been noted in the special case of dipthongs,
where the second vowel is always a high one. E.g ɨt̪əi (uncle) , t̪ələi (forest) and mʌnəu (to get). Adaptation of
the schwa is known to be a word shortening device in several modern languages
but how this influence passed onto Rabha is not clear as Bengali is still
devoid of it.
Conclusion:
“It clearly is not justified
to assume that one can only argue successfully for a contact origin if you fail
to find any plausible internal motivation for a particular change. One reason
is that the goal is always to find the best historical explanation for a
change, and a good solid contact explanation is preferable to a weak internal
one; another reason is that the possibility of multiple causation should always
be considered and it also often happens that an internal motivation combines
with an external motivation to produce a change”(Thompson)
The UNESCO index for language vitality has
announced Rabha to be “slightly vulnerable” and not endangered. The internal
motivation for native speakers is not as acute as a matter of survival and they
still continue to learn and use the language as their mother tongue. However,
formal education is conducted in Bengali which is also the language for
obtaining higher education in the state, government jobs and more importantly
the lingua franca in the trade and market area. Thus practicising bilingualism
in bengali becomes a practical necessity and has given rise to a situation of
more intense contact wherein phonology, the phonetic
realizations of native phonemes,loss of some native phonemes not present in the
source language, addition of new phonemes even in native vocabulary, prosodic
features such as stress placement, loss or addition of syllable structure
con-straints occurs gradually over time.
Yet another point to be kept in mind is that contact-induced change
should not be proposed as an explanation if a similar or identical change
happened elsewhere too, without any contact or at least without the same
contact situation. Thus to verify the above findings and find alternative
justifications a thorough analysis of the contact situation of the
north-eastern dialects of the language also needs to be done. The study and
descriptive representation of the Bengali dialect spoken in the Dooar region in
a structured manner is also required to see the direction in which subsequent
changes in sounds are happening. It has commonly been inferred that languages
alter in the direction of being less marked, in other words towards a simpler
structure- be it syntactically, morphologically or phonetically. There could be
a similar, natural order for constraints in borrowing and accurately done
contact studies shall be able to give us valid answers to the above puzzle.
Having laid down all observations and discussions, seeing the various
additions and alterations in the phonemic charts of both consonants and vowels,
it can be justly said that reorganization along with a sincere comparative
study of the various forms of Rabha should be conducted.
References:
·
Abbi, Anvita. A manual Of
Linguistics Field Work and Structure of Indian Languages.Lincolm Europa,2001.
·
Basumatri,Phukana Candra.The
Rabha Tribe Of North-East India and Bangladesh.Mittal Publications.2010
·
Bhattacharya.”A Skeletal
structure of Bengali Phonology.”Shodhganga.
http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/155893/10/10_chapter%204.pdf.
Accessed 6 January 2018.
·
Burling, Robbins.”The
Tibeto-Burman Languages Of North East India.”LaPolla, Graham Thurgood and Randy
J.Sino-Tibetan Languages.Routledge,2003.169-191.
·
Das, Amrita.”Rabha Speech
Community in Colonial and Post Colonial Eras.”Language in India(2017).
·
LaPolla,Randy J.”The Role Of
Migration and Language Contact in the Development of Sino-Tibetan Langauge
Family.”Dixon,Alexandra Y.Aikhenvald and R.M.W.Areal Diffusion and Genetic
Inheritence.Oxford University Press,2001.242-263.
·
Roy, Manadev.”A Historical
Outline of the Rabhas of North Bengal.”IJIR vol2 issue 3(2016) :650-659.
·
Thompson,Sarah G.Language
Contact. Edinburgh University Press,2001. Edinburgh.
·
LIS India.
http://www.ciil-lisindia.net/Rabha/Rabha_struct.html. Acessed 27 November 2017.
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