A grammar of Palula
About this ebook
The language is spoken by about 10,000 people in the Chitral district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. This is the first extensive description of the formerly little-documented Palula language, and is one of only a few in-depth studies available for languages in the extremely multilingual Hindukush-Karakoram region. The grammar is based on original fieldwork data, collected over the course of about ten years, commencing in 1998. It is primarily in the form of recorded, mainly narrative, texts, but supplemented by targeted elicitation as well as notes of observed language use. All fieldwork was conducted in close collaboration with the Palula-speaking community, and a number of native speakers took active part in the process of data gathering, annotation and data management. The main areas covered are phonology, morphology and syntax, illustrated with a large number of example items and utterances, but also a few selected lexical topics of some prominence have received a more detailed treatment as part of the morphosyntactic structure. Suggestions for further research that should be undertaken are given throughout the grammar. The approach is theory-informed rather than theory-driven, but an underlying functional-typological framework is assumed. Diachronic development is taken into account, particularly in the area of morphology, and comparisons with other languages and references to areal phenomena are included insofar as they are motivated and available. The description also provides a brief introduction to the speaker community and their immediate environment.
About the author
Henrik Liljegren is a researcher in linguistics at Stockholm University, where he received his PhD in 2008. He is one of the co-founders of Forum for Language Initiatives (FLI), a resource centre for the many language communities in Pakistan’s mountainous North, where he served for several years while also conducting fieldwork in the country. His main research interests are areal-linguistic typology, language contact, Indo-Iranian languages, case alignment, phonology and lexicography. Apart from research per se, Henrik Liljegren has been engaged in language maintenance efforts and orthography development, mentoring language activists in local communities to collect and organize data, and in building networks between local communities and organizations. He is presently leading a Swedish Research Council project, investigating language contact and relatedness in the Hindukush-Karakoram region.
