Specimens Of Languages Of India

This 1874 work by the author, a British government official whose Scheme for the Government of India is also reissued in this series, presents a survey of the diverse languages of India, using material obtained usually by British army officers trained by him to collect ‘specimens’ in the course of their normal work. The tabular material is presented with the English words or phrases in one column and their equivalent in the Indian language under discussion in another most of the languages are represented by more than one dialect, such as the ‘Punjabee of Lahore’ and the ‘Punjabee of Mooltan’. In his introduction to the work, Campbell emphasises that the survey is not scientific, and his main conclusion is that in addition to the broad division of Aryan and Dravidian language types, India contains a huge number of ‘aboriginal’ languages which will require further study. It is very clear that most of the aboriginal tribes of the Central Provinces and several of those of Western Bengal (including in these latter the Dangars, Oraons of Chota Nagpore, Paharies of Rajmehal, and Khonds of Orissa) are radically allied to the Dravidians. Intermixed with these tribes, but speaking a language quite without affinity to the Dravidian tongues, are the tribes which he calls Kolarian, forming a minority among the aborigines of the Central Provinces, but a great majority among those of Western Bengal. In the border plains of Eastern Bengal, Assam, and Cachar, and the lower hills bounding these countries, we come on a group of tongues evidently very nearly allied to one another, and which show that a large number of tribes, extending, under very different conditions, over a wide extent of country, and known by different names, are in fact closely cognate. This fact is the more important, because a large part of the population of Eastern Bengal is universally recognised to be cognate to the tribes speaking these languages.