facilities. Out of fifteen people who volunteered to take the test, only ten were qualified. The rest of them could not follow the procedure. There is a primary school in the village, but children are not
interested in education.
3.6 Result and analysis
Table 8 shows the results of the Recorded Text Test. Columns list the villages where each story was tested, with story names and the villages from which it was developed shown in rows. The Hometown
Test results are italicised and bolded in the table.
Table 8. Results of Recorded Text Testing Test Points
Reference Points Ambadungar
Chillare Astambha
Ambadungar Dungra Bhili tiger
story Avg
Sd No
96 7
10
95 5
13 88
7 10
Chillare Noiri pickpocketing
story Avg
Sd No
96 5
13
88 12.5
10
3.6.1 Dungra Bhili tiger story
The average score of Noiri speaking subjects on the Dungra Bhili story was 88 percent in Astambha and 95 percent in Chillare, which is comparatively high, with low standard deviation 7 and 5, respectively,
pointing to adequate comprehension of the Dungra Bhili text. The results are in line with situation 2 in table 6: most people understood the story. However the result cannot be interpreted only in terms of a
numerical threshold, but rather must be evaluated in light of other indicators of intelligibility, such as lexical similarity, dialect opinions and reported patterns of contact and communication.
As explained in the section 3.3, post RTTHTT questions were asked to investigate the attitude of Noiri speakers towards the Dungra Bhili variety. All subjects in Astambha and eight out of thirteen
subjects in Chillare, when asked in what language they thought the story was told, reported that the Dungra Bhili story is in Noiri. But many of them felt the variety was different in terms of words,
pronunciation or style. People in Chillare seemed to have more contact with the outside world than people in Astambha do. When answering the second post RTT question “Where do you think the story
teller is from?”, more than half of the Chillare subjects said that the story was told in the dialect of Lakadiya Hanuman the nearest village, about three kilometres away.
22
More than half of the Astambha subjects were non-responsive to this question. Others responded that the story was from the bank of the
Narmada or from Taloda.
23
One educated man in the village, after going through the Dungra Bhili written material, reported the language as pure, but very different from their variety. According to him
they can understand Vasavi materials better than Dungra Bhili.
22
They explained it by saying that the word ono is used in the text, which is present in language of Lakadiya
Hanuman. It is reported that Noiri is spoken in Lakadiya Hanuman too.
23
Because of a dam project, some villages were relocated to Taloda, one of the tahsils in Nandurbar.
3.6.2 Noiri pickpocketing story
