Jad, an Endangered Language of India

Jad, an Endangered Language of India

Submitted to Dr. Akhter Aziz

Submitted by Nomana Anjum

M. Phil Eglish (Linguistics)

Session 2014-16

Fatima Jinnah Women University, the Mall Rawalpindi

Jad, an Endangered Language

Preamble

Jad is a native language of India comprises a community of about 300 people. It belongs to the language family Sino-Tibetan. The people of Jad are also called Jad. Thus Jad is a noun as well as an adjective.

Jad (Dzad), also known as Bhotia and Rongba, and is spoken in the Uttar Pradesh region of the Himalayas, in India. It is spoken in several villages, and the two main villages are Jadang and Nilang in the Harsil sub-division of the Uttarkashi District. Jad is closely related to the Lahuli–Spiti language, which is another Tibetic language. Jad is spoken besides Garhwali and Hindi. Code switching between Jad and Garhwali is very regular. The language borrows some vocabulary from both Hindi and Garhwali.

Jad, an Endangered Language

A language is supposed to be an endangered one when its speakers are about 1000. It is seriously endangered when its speakers are about 500 and it is near death when it has a community of less than 100 people. Jad is seriously endangered as it has a community of about 300 people. It has minimal educational support and the communication process occurs in Hindi language. Being a bilingual community, the people are most inspired by Hindi language and thus it is another threat to its survival.

Written Communication

All written communication is in Hindi, not Jad. Attitudes to Jad are unenthusiastic with little institutional support. Education, media, television, and all other official sources of communication are in Hindi. There is no known literature, with the exemption of a one page translation of a story about a wild son. It is vigorously endangered and under severe hazard, and it is unclear if the current situation of bilingualism and code switching will carry on or if Jad will be entirely replaced by either Hindi or Garhwali.

Naming

 The name Bhotia means "those from the north", referring to the geographical site of the population who speaks the language. The name Bhotia covers a large set of languages and is used to refer to numerous groups, Jad is specifically spoken by the Bhotias of Nilang Tehri. The term Bhotia is unrelated to the language of the people of Bhutan, which is a sovereign Himalayan state in the northeastern area of the subcontinent. The name Jad is derived from the summer village name, where the Jad people pass the summer season, which is called Jadang.

History

Scholarship on Jad and people has been very limited. The residents have not been subjected to a careful study or survey. Work has been scattered and of unsure quality. As of 1977, there were two causes for the lack of scholarship on the language and people. First, the Bhotias live in places which are hard to reach geographically. Secondly, safety clearance must be obtained from the Home Department and Defense Department of India prior to permitting the scholars to visit the border where the Jad live. As a result, the amount of research that has been conducted is limited in quantity and scope.

Phonetics

Vowels

 The following table describes the place in the mouth where vowels are pronounced in Jad.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e	ə	o
Low			a

Only the back u and o are rounded in circumstance of lip positioning, all other vowels are unrounded. There are no diphthongs in Jad, but vowels regularly occur in sequence. There is no tough rule for which order the vowels must fall in when in a sequence, so many diverse orders are found in Jad.

Vowels tend to be nasalized when they pursue a nasalized consonant, and glottalized when they are placed before a glottal stop. The pronunciation of the vowel is effected by the close by consonant sounds.

Consonants

Most consonants can begin a word, with the exemption of n and r. It is extremely uncommon for a consonant to end a word, with the exception of b, d, and g. Voiced consonants are irregularly de-voiced, mostly when in the final position of a word or coming immediately before a voiceless sound. Unvoiced plositives tend to be voiced when coming after a voiced sound. De aspiration also occurs. When an aspirated consonant is followed by a back vowel, the target of the consonant is significantly reduced. Like vowels in Jad, pronunciation of consonant sounds shifts according to the sounds surrounding the consonants.

Consonant clusters can be found in initial and center sections of words. The first consonant must be a plosive, a fricative, or a liquid consonant. The second consonant must be a semi-vowel or a liquid consonant.

Word structure

Words may be mono-morphemic or poly-morphemic. Words follow the following rule set:

1.     Words can begin with any consonant but n and r.

2.     Native words finish in a vowel, a plosive, a nasal, or a liquid consonant.

3.     No native word begins or ends in a consonant cluster other than the exceptions mentioned above.

4.     Normally, no aspirate vocoid or a semivowel ends a national word.

5.     Words have a small quantity of pause on either side of them in a slow tempo of speech.

Word composition is also limited by a set of allowed syllables. Permitted syllables are /V/, /VC/, /CV/, /CCV/, /CVC/, /CCVC/, and /CVCC/. These syllables can be combined to form longer words.

Nouns

In Jad, nouns act as subjects or objects of verbs. Nouns are subject to number, gender, and cases. Inanimate nouns are genderless and also are not changed for plural number. Animate nouns and human nouns have distinct mechanisms for marking gender. Pluralization is marked for human beings only. New nouns can be formed by adding new branches, reduplicating stems, or adding suffixes.

Gender is denoted in two ways. Prefixes can be added to point toward gender of living creatures, or distinct words are used for female and male counterparts. Plurals are marked on animate nouns by adding plural suffixes. Plurals can be noted on inanimate nouns by using a descriptor word to present details about the noun, but cannot themselves be changed to symbolize pluralization.

Difference cases of nouns are used to describe a variety of functions. These include possession, subject, object, means, reason, advantage, division, origin, material composition, time, place, etc.

Word order

Jad follows a structure of noun-adjective. An instance is the phrase "a very black dog." In Jad, this phrase is "khi nagpo məŋpo cig", or "dog black very one." This exemplifies the noun-adjective word order. It also places adjectives prior to degree descriptors, following an adjective-degree syntactic form. For example, the phrase "very black" in Jad would be "nagpo məŋpo" where nagpo translates as black andməŋpo translates to very.

Conclusion

Jad is gravely under threat as it has been left with a community of about 300 people. Having less institutional support as the written communication occurs in Hindi language, this aspect is also a source of serious hazard to its existence. Being a bilingual community, the people prefer to communicate mostly in Hindi language and thus it is another threat to its existence. Thus it can be said that it is a seriously endangered language.