| FOREWORD |
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The central Institute of Indian Languages set up in 1969 is entrusted with the responsibility
of developing Indian Languages through research, training and material production. The Indian
languages are at various stages of development from the point of view of the extent of elaboration
of their functions and they require different treatments. Development of the tribal languages of
the country involves many issues of policy, implementation and academic contribution. Some of them
are to be reduced to writing and most of them need codification from the point of view of standardisation,
preparation of grammar, dictionary and such other linguistic materials and production of written
literature.
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One of the primary activities of the Institute relating to its work on tribal languages is writing a
grammar. The grammar is not only the first step in the direction of codification of the language
but also is a basic material for the teaching and learning of the language. It also provides materials
for the typological and areal comparisons for languages and for studies of language universals. The
theoretical notions about grammar have changed substantially in the recent decades and many of the notions
are to be tested with data from various little know languages. It is hoped that the grammar series
of the Institute will fulfill at least partially these demands from linguists and language planners.
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The grammars of various tribal languages, it is hoped, will lead to a handbook of Indian languages,
which will be of great use to the students of linguistics in India. India has a long grammatical
tradition and it is now absorbing grammatical models developed in the west. It will be a worthy
goal to achieve to develop a grammatical model for the description of Indian languages derived out
of both traditional and modern developments.
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| (D.P. PATTANAYAK) |
| Director |
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