Bundeli speech varieties Summary of findings

1.5 Summary of findings

1.5.1 Bundeli speech varieties

1.5.1.1 Relationship between Bundeli speech varieties While lexical similarity results along with the recorded text testing are somewhat inconclusive, they point to three different groupings: the Standard Plus area the Standard speech varieties, the Northwest speech varieties and Banaphari; the Northeast area the speech varieties from Banda district; and the Southern area speech varieties from Balaghat district. Of all the speech varieties, the sample taken from the Standard Bundeli-speaking area of Chhatarpur district appears to be the most well understood. Relationship between Bundeli and other languages It is difficult to come to any firm conclusions regarding Bundeli’s relationship with other languages since we only have wordlist data to make our judgments, and, in the case of Braj, some post-RTT responses after listening to two texts. Of the Other Languages investigated, Braj and Hindi are of prime importance, since both have high status and a strong written tradition. With respect to the relationship of Braj and Bundeli, the Preliminary Questionnaire, the wordlists, and the post-RTT responses indicate a moderately close relationship, but one where there could be problems with at least portions of the population in adequate understanding. A key factor for further research would be to determine how much of Braj could be understood by a Bundeli speaker, since most of the investigation thus far was concerned with understanding in the opposite direction. With respect to the relationship between Hindi and Bundeli, an analogous situation in Haryanvi showed that even though there seems to be a moderate to close relationship between Haryanvi and Hindi, the uneducated subjects did not perform well on the Hindi RTT. The performance of uneducated subjects is important because these subjects presumably have the least exposure to Hindi, the language of education, and therefore their scores more closely represent “inherent” intelligibility, unless there had been significant contact. It is assumed that uneducated Bundeli speakers would certainly not perform better than the uneducated Haryanvi speakers on a Hindi RTT, since Bundeli is not as closely related to Hindi as Haryanvi is. More investigation is desirable to determine the extent of inherent intelligibility between Bundeli and Hindi, but we can tentatively conclude that the inherent intelligibility between Hindi and Bundeli is not very good.

1.5.2 Bilingualism