Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture and Education 2018

Deciphering the Verbal Morphology of the Mahale Language

Towhid Bin Muzaffar, Haroonuzzaman

Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB)

ABSTRACT

A project entitled Preservation of Endangered Languages of Bangladesh, funded by Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB), focuses on the preservation, protection and promotion of indigenous languages which require literature collection, compilation of a dictionary and a description of the grammatical systems of a language as indispensible prerequisites. After substantial work in documenting and analyzing Mahale Literature (rhymes, songs, poems and short stories), the current paper ventures into the territory of Mahale grammar which firstly may be analyzed by documenting the different paradigms. The onomasiological elicitations collected through intensive interviews of two educated Mahale persons have been analyzed and compared to describe the various grammatical systems - nominal, pronominal, adjectival, adverbial and verbal. As one major area of this study is the verbal system, the different tenses and aspects have been looked into in this paper.

KEYWORDS

Endangered Language, Preservation, Linguistics, Morphology