Documentation and description of Malto
The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides grants worldwide to for the linguistic documentation of endangered language and knowledge. Grantees create multimedia collection of endangered languages. These collections are preserved and made freely available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) housed at the library of SOAS University of London.
The aim of this project is to document and describe Malto. Malto is spoken around the Rajmahal hills in Eastern India. The low literacy rate and absence of written documents often confines the language as the language of home and there again it is considered a burden to be passed on to the children since its not going to be useful in life. Now may be the last instance to witness the language in its fullest possible use among the community, for the growing tendencies of language shift is slowly but gradually replacing Malto with Hindi and Bangla. Malto is a North Dravidian language coexisting with Hindi and Bangla of the Indo-Aryan language family and Santali of the Austro-Asiatic language family. Describing Malto would hence be a study in contact and convergence situation in the area too.
Primary investigator: Chaithra Puttaswamy
Project Details
Location: India, Southern Asia, Asia
Organiser(s):
Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Project partner(s): SOAS, University of London
Funder(s):
Arcadia
Funding received: £5,400.00
Commencement Date: 01/2001
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