Visitors to Hyderabad are often puzzled when greeted with ‘kyaa honaa (hai)’ by someone at a shop, for instance. Little do they realise that what is asked for is ‘what do you want’ rather than ‘what has to happen to you’, the interpretation expected given the idiomatic parlance of standard Hindi. But how come this expression has the sense it has in Hyderabadi Hindi or Dakhini. The answer should be obvious if one has any inkling of Telugu, the language of the region. For there, the equivalent for it is ‘miiku eemi kaavaali ’( you.dat what wanted), which literally means ‘what do you want’. The Telugu verb here is a composite of a bleached form of verb be (which ‘unadorned’ form of is/was/are/am etc.) and a little piece of a word meaning ‘want’. The verb be in Telugu, unlike Hindi, is not that transparent enough, because Telugu bars verb be in the most usual contexts, for example, as ‘is’. Yet speakers in a multilingual setting are perhaps able to infer inductively from the other patterns prevalent in the dominant language:
aayana mii mitruDu kaa vaccu
He your friend be come.past
‘He could be your friend’
Hindi has a way of expressing a ‘modal’ meaning – like, for example, obligation – by combining the unadorned form of a verb with the verb be as an assisting verb when the Subject of the sentence is not in its plain clothing, but carries an extra marker like ‘-ko’ in the example below. Banking on this, Dakhini has here deployed the infinitival form of the verb be with or without an accompanying auxiliary verb be.
aap-ko yahaan aanaa hai
You here come have
‘You have to come here’
Yet another interesting aspect in Dakhini Hindi that one encounters is sentences of the following form:
Mai usku kal dekhe so huum
I him yesterday saw PRT have
‘I had seen him yesterday ‘
Yeh kal kharide so hai
This yesterday bought PRT is
‘This was bought yesterday’
Convergence in language need not entail total surrender to the demands of a language in contact
Srikumar K.
The particle so (marked here simply as PRT) in these apparently mark their main verbs like ‘see’ or ‘buy’ in the above, as nominalised or tuned nominal (see further explanation below). As the resulting sentence forms a definitive statement on its stated proposition, they are identified as ‘Definitives’. The particle so is also shared by other types of clauses and is arguably relatable to other types of particles in Hindi and Punjabi (like hue):
Tum aaye so din mer-ku yaad hai
You came PRT day me-to memory is
‘I remember the day you came’
Linguists call this little particle as a nominalising particle, that is, it is like a magic potion that turns a verbal sounding element into a nominal sounding (=noun-like) element. Thus, in Dakhini, clausal complements (jaate ‘going’) can be turned nominal by using the particle so:
Main usko jaate so dekhaa
I him going PRT saw
‘I saw him going’
However, the particle so in Dakhini corresponds to two types of elements in Telugu: one, the hue type use (marked by [a] in Telugu in the following example) and two, the magic potion use observable in clause-like chunks and ‘Definitives’:
Ninna vaccin-a manishi
Yesterday came-PRT person
‘The person who came yesterday’
Hence, even though the analogy of Dravidian underlies the deployment of the so in Dakhini, what it replaces is a form of the auxiliary verb be, as in case of Hindi. As the this form of the verb be is also to be found with nominal clauses and equivalents for Definitives in Hindi, particle so replaces them too, predictably. In fact, the auxiliary verb be sustains tense in Definitives is Dakhini in spirit with no counterpart in Telugu.
Existing literature tells us that familiar language contact phenomenon of convergence underpins the foregoing linguistic tendencies in Dakhini Hindi. For, long coexistence in a geographical area could give rise to structural Convergence in languages despite their distinct genetic lineages. Going by the discussion here, similarities achieved thereby appear limitable to perhaps some superficial aspects of language alone. Because on a micro level, the converging linguistic varieties hold on to their own grounds, as the elements banked upon are those available to them. Thus, Convergence in language need not entail total surrender to the demands of a language in contact, hence celebrating Mother tongues in a way, albeit covertly.
ekushé 