Article published in:
Gender, Language and the Periphery: Grammatical and social gender from the marginsEdited by Julie Abbou and Fabienne H. Baider
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 264] 2016
► pp. 165–194
The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse
In this article I present a description of grammatical gender in Bajjika, a
minority language of the Eastern Indo-Aryan family spoken in a small region
in the northern part of the north Indian state of Bihar. Grammatical gender in
Bajjika is expressed in the nominal forms, definitive particles, and verbal agreement.
Although the morphology of Bajjika verb-agreement is one of the most
elaborate in Indo-Aryan languages, the formalization of gender in the verbal
morphology is very simple; the gender of only the second person honorific
and the third person honorific referents in the subject function is encoded. The
definitive particle receives gender marking when it is added to an adjective. In
this article, I identify and describe different areas of Bajjika grammar where
gender is encoded. Based on the analyses of excerpts from natural discourse, I
also observe an interesting tendency in terms of (written and spoken) modebased
neutralization of gender in Bajjika discourse. While the masculine and
feminine genders of the second and third person “honorific” referents are
consistently encoded in the verb-agreement in the spoken mode, in the written
mode it is neutralized. We may then witness a potential neutralization of gender
in terms of a diachronic change in the Bajjika grammar.
Keywords: Bajjika, Bihari language, Eastern Indo-Aryan, gender, grammatical gender, language change, lexical gender
Published online: 16 December 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.264.07kum
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.264.07kum
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