2.2.1 Procedures
Intelligibility of Mundari speech among Bhumij speakers was studied with the help of Recorded Text Tests RTT. Mundari stories were recorded on cassette and were taken to various Bhumij-speaking sites
for testing. Mother tongue Bhumij speakers listened to the recorded stories and were asked questions interspersed in the story to test their comprehension. Ten people were considered the minimum number
to be given this test, and subjects’ responses to the story questions were noted down and scored. A person’s score is considered a reflection of his comprehension of the text, and the average score of all the
subjects is indicative of the community’s intelligibility of the speech variety spoken in the location from where the story originated. Included with the test point’s average score is a calculation for the variation
between individual subjects’ scores, or standard deviation, which helps in interpreting how representative those scores are.
After each story, subjects were asked questions such as how different they felt the speech was and how much they could understand of it. These subjective post-RTT responses give an additional
perspective in interpreting the objective test data. If a subject’s answers to these questions are comparable with his or her score, it gives more certainty to the results. If, however, the post-RTT
responses and test score show some dissimilarity, then this discrepancy can be investigated.
Bhumij speakers were permitted to take tests of the Mundari stories only if they could perform well on a test developed in their own dialect. This preliminary test, called a hometown test HTT, eliminates
people who essentially cannot understand the test-taking procedure. Hometown testing with mother tongue speakers of the same speech variety as that on the cassette also validates the text for use at other
sites. Questions which appear to have not been adequately understood by hometown test subjects are eliminated from the final test version.
For a fuller description of recorded text testing, refer to Appendix C.1 as well as to Casad 1974. Demographic profiles of the subjects at each site, their test scores on the HTT and RTTs, and post-RTT
responses are presented in Appendix C.2. The stories and questions used in the testing appear in Appendix C.3.
2.2.2 Site selection
The Mundari speech spoken in Ranchi district of Bihar is considered to be the standard variety of that language. It is the variety in which radio programmes are broadcast and books are written. For testing,
two forms of the speech were obtained. One was a personal-experience narrative, such as that described in Appendix C.1. The other was a passage read from the Mundari Bible, published in 1911. The text was
the story of the lost son, taken from Luke 15:11–32, and selected because of its simplicity. The personal- experience story was given by a Mundari speaker living about 30 kilometres south of Ranchi, and the
Lost Son text was read by a man living now in Ranchi who has been involved in Mundari radio broadcasts for about ten years.
The Bhumij sites chosen for testing were areas that were reported to have a concentration of Bhumij speakers. It was also considered important to test in areas where there were few Mundari-speaking
communities, so that theoretically, intelligibility acquired through contact would not overly influence subjects’ performance. The three sites that were selected were Dighinuasahi village in Mayurbhanj
district of Orissa, Munduy village in Paschim Singhbhum district of Bihar, and Heseldipa village in Bihar’s Purba Singhbhum district.
In Munduy and Heseldipa, proper hometown texts were not obtained and tested. Instead, a story developed on Varenkamp’s Ho survey in Dumadie village in northern Mayurbhanj district, Orissa, was
used as the hometown test at these two locations. In Munduy, since its location from Dumadie is not excessive, it was felt that the Dumadie story could adequately be used as a control test. The distance
between Heseldipa and Dumadie is greater, so it would have been best to develop a separate control test in Heseldipa. The lack of time prevented this, and the Dumadie story was used as the hometown test
instead.
2.2.3 Results and analysis
The results of intelligibility testing of Mundari speech among Bhumij speakers in various sites are given in table 4. The columns of the table are the stories which were used for testing, called the reference
point. The rows consist of the subjects at each site who took the tests, called the test point. The scores of each hometown test are shown with a double border.
Key: avg
average score for all subjects sd
standard deviation num
number of subjects Hometown test scores
Table 4. Results of Recorded Text Testing among Mundari and Bhumij-speaking sites
Reference Point Test
Point Mundari
Colloquial “Ghost”
Story Mundari
Literary “Lost Son”
Story Bhumij
Dighinuasahi “Bear”
Story Bhumij
Dumadie “Punishment”
Story Bhumij
Dighinuasahi Subjects
avg sd
num 90
9.6 13
76 12.8
13 98
3.8 13
no testing done
Bhumij Munduy
Subjects avg
sd num
91 11.4
11 82
9.9 11
no testing done 97
4.6 11
Bhumij Heseldipa
Subjects avg
sd num
88 10.0
10 76
11.9 8
no testing done 97
4.7 11
Mundari Ranchi District
Subjects avg
sd num
99 4.3
11 99
4.7 11
no testing done no testing done
Results of the Mundari “Ghost” story The Mundari Ghost story received high averages at the three Bhumij-speaking sites. The percentages of
88, 90 and 91 show good comprehension and understanding of the Mundari colloquial story. The low variation of scores between sites also gives indication that subjects in the three locations understood the
narrative equally well.
In Dighinuasahi, one subject scored 61 percent on the Ghost story, which increased the standard deviation significantly and decreased the average score slightly.
3
The total number of vocabulary items compared is sometimes less than 210 for certain wordlists, usually because a particular item is not
familiar to the language assistants or the proper word cannot be obtained. The fact that the subject was a 50 year old male with an undermatric education was not cause for his lower score, as there were other
subjects, male and female, older and younger, educated and uneducated who performed well on the test.
3
Eliminating this subject from the scoring, the results would be: avg = 93, sd = 3.9.
In addition, this subject passed the hometown test, demonstrating he was basically familiar with the testing procedure, and scored above the test average on the subsequent Lost Son story.
In response to post-RTT questions, some subjects in Dighinuasahi either did not know, or were not sure where the Ghost story originated. Two subjects thought it was from Bihar, and a few felt the story
was from a nearby place. While two subjects commented that the speech in the story “is our language,” most said it was slightly different, generally mentioning that it was mixed with Ho. Nine of the thirteen
subjects said they understood the story fully, and the subject who scored 61 acknowledged that he understood about half. Interestingly, three subjects who said the speech of the story was “different” and
“not same” and “understood only 50 percent” scored 89, 93, and 100 respectively.
In Munduy, much the same situation as in Dighinuasahi occurred, as one subject scored 64 and another scored 75.
4
Though both of these subjects were uneducated older females, two other subjects who were also uneducated older females each scored 93. These subjects not only passed the hometown
test, but performed well on the Lost Son story. Why these subjects did relatively poorly on the Ghost story is not clear.
In response to post-RTT questions in Munduy, four of the eleven subjects correctly identified the story as Mundari. All four of these subjects including the subject who scored 75 percent noted that the
language in the story was a little different, but that everything was understandable. A few other subjects gave similar reviews. The subject who scored 64 percent said the speech on the recording was “very
different” and that she could not understand everything.
In Heseldipa, three subjects identified the narrative as Mundari, and said it was a little different. Several subjects thought it was Ho language from the Chaibasa area. More people at Heseldipa
acknowledged a difference between the speech of the narrative and their speech, even though Heseldipa is closer to the story’s origin than the other two RTT sites. Four of the twelve
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subjects admitted they could not understand the story fully. It was at this village that a few subjects said they were confused
during the testing since the speech was different between that of the story and that of the test questions which were recorded in the subjects’ dialect.
Results of the Mundari “Lost Son” story The “Lost Son” story from the Mundari New Testament averaged between 73 and 82 in the three Bhumij-
speaking sites. The scores are lower than for the Ghost story, which probably reflects the fact that the text is a more archaic variety of speech. Even so, the averages indicate that the story was understandable
to most Bhumij speakers.
In Dighinuasahi, subjects had mixed impressions from listening to the recording regarding where they thought the story originated. Many believed it was from nearby areas, possibly because they felt the
text was mixed with the Ho language. Most of the thirteen subjects said that the speech was a little different than theirs, though only five people reported that they fully understood the story. Three people
identified the story as being from the Bible. Their scores – 75, 84, and 86 – were not significantly different from the average of 76 percent
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to make a difference in the overall score. In Munduy, many subjects had no idea where the story was from or precisely what language it was.
Subjects gave varying reviews to the speech of the text, saying it was mixed with one or more of the following languages: Bhumij, Ho, Mundari and Santali. Almost all of the eleven subjects thought the
4
Eliminating these subjects from the scoring, the results would be: avg = 96, sd = 4.3.
5
Table 6 for the Ghost story at Heseldipa shows only 10 subjects taking the test. This is because one subject failed the hometown test and another did not complete the test. Both subjects, however, responded to the post-RTT
questions.
6
There were two questions in the story that were missed by a majority of subjects. All subjects missed question 14, and all except two missed question 15. It is not clear whether either or both of these questions were translated
incorrectly or had, for instance, touched lexical items which were not familiar to the subjects in that location. If these two questions were eliminated, the adjusted scores would be: avg = 86, sd = 14.0.
speech was only a little different than theirs, and everyone remarked that they understood everything of the story.
In Heseldipa, as with the Ghost story, a few subjects said that they were confused with the change in languages during the testing, saying in effect, “the story is in a different language and the questions
are in my language.” Three of nine
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subjects thought the story was Ho, while four subjects identified the speech in the story as Mundari, since they had heard the language before. Out of these four subjects,
three remarked that they understood everything in the story in addition to two others. The remainder of the subjects commented they could not fully understand the story.
3 Social aspects of Bhumij speech found in this survey
This chapter describes more social aspects of the Bhumij people and their speech, exploring the topics of language use, language attitudes and bilingualism. A sociolinguistic questionnaire SLQ composed
primarily of open-ended questions was used, along with observations of the researchers. The questionnaire was administered in only seven sites, usually to a small group. Needless to say, results and
conclusions must be taken lightly and tentatively. The questionnaire is shown in Appendix D.1, while subjects’ responses to the questionnaire are presented in Appendix D.2.
3.1 Language use
Kategori