ABSTRACT
As the powerful languages of the world are continuously pushing the powerless languages to the fringe, the peripheral languages are always on the brink of extinction. That is why, the key purpose of this IUB-funded longitudinal project is to document an endangered language, Mahale, spoken by an indigenous community in Northern Bangladesh by describing its grammar for its revitalization. The subjects of our study are the Mahale people who live in two villages in Northern Bangladesh. The data was collected through focused group discussions and interviews of native speakers of the Mahale language in these two villages. The onomasiological elicitations collected through intensive interviews of Mahale people have been analyzed and compared to describe the various grammatical systems – nominal, pronominal, adjectival, adverbial and verbal. This study adopts a descriptive approach to analyze Mahale morphosyntax. As the major area of this study is the verbal and nominal systems, the current paper looks at the use of Mahale morphemes in various syntactic constructions. Some transitive and intransitive verbs have been used to determine whether Mahale is an ergative, accusative or a neutral language in this paper.
KEYWORDS
Endangered Language, Preservation, Linguistics, Morphology, Syntax