and Dasgupta 1964:10. During their two-month study in 1959, Nigam and Dasgupta made recordings from which speech samples were taken, which they later analysed linguistically, and then carried out
field interviews. At that time they did not feel the problem of Hindi influence on BhumijMundari speech was as pertinent as the issue of their assimilation to Bengali forms.
Bhattacharya endeavoured to make a descriptive account of the various Mundari languages, giving data from sixteen speeches ten of which he calls “languages”, six “dialects”. However, his work was cut
short before completion due to his unfortunate demise. The posthumously compiled work Bhattacharya 1975 focuses mainly on the commonalties between the speeches, noting characteristic features of the
various members, but it is not an attempt to delineate hard and fast distinguishing features that would be necessarily unique to one variety and not another.
1.2.4 Sociolinguistic aspects of Bhumij speech
Nigam and Dasgupta focused their work on three Bhumij regions: BunduTamar in Ranchi district of Bihar; Balarampur in Purulia district, West Bengal; and Ichagarh Thana in Singhbhum district.
Essentially, Nigam and Dasgupta characterised the area as three points on a triangle with BunduTamar representing the most conservative corner maintaining their mother tongue, Balarampur the most
assimilated corner, and Ichagarh Thana representing elements of both conservatism and shift. A look at each of these locations follows.
Map 4. Regions investigated by Nigam and Dasgupta
BunduTamar, Ranchi It is not surprising that this region was considered to have the “purest” Bhumij, since it is closest to the
Mundari heartland. Here the name “Bhumij Thar” was used more frequently than any other in referring to the Munda-form of their speech. Bhumij men in Purulia, where there is more assimilation to Bengali,
get their wives from BunduTamar. According to Nigam and Dasgupta’s analysis, Bhumij speech from this region is closer to Standard Mundari as spoken in the area south of Ranchi than is the Bhumij
variety in Ichagarh. Here they also speak Tamaria also known as Panch Pargania, an LWC of the region, and some speak “Khari Boli”, a Hindi derivative.
Balarampur, Purulia In this area, Nigam and Dasgupta’s study describes the language shift as complete towards Bengali. The
people are monolingual in the state language and some claim origins different from the Mundari people. The community was reported to have preferred an identity as caste people rather than as tribals, though
officially the group is noted as a scheduled tribe in West Bengal.
Ichagarh, Singhbhum The Bhumij of this region were said to speak their mother tongue at home and within the community, as
well as a form of Bengali which the people called “Manbhum Bengali.” They were reported to use more borrowing from Bengali state language of the area until only a few years before the study, when
speaking their mother tongue compared to the Bhumij of Bundu and Tamar. However, at that time, they still maintained strong attitudes toward their mother tongue by declaring, “When we use Thar we use
Thar only and cannot afford to be laughing stock of others by practising indiscriminate mixture of Bengali into our Thar” Nigam and Dasgupta 1964:188. In addition, the authors report that nowhere
was the shift toward Bengali in adopting forms so prevalent as to make Bhumij Thar imperceptible from Bengali. Elements of “purism” in terms of Bhumij pronunciation persist, especially with regard to the
checked unreleased consonants word finally
d̚, b̚. Yet while the data seemed to indicate relative stability of the mother tongue, other signs indicative
of shift were observed, such as the tendency of school children to avoid speaking their mother tongue in the schools for fear of ostracism by other children. It was not clear based on Nigam and Dasgupta’s
evidence whether a stable diglossia or a tendency toward language shift was occurring. The latter can truly only be addressed in a diachronic study.
1.2.5 Linguistic aspects of Bhumij speech
