Campus Life (4): Field Method in Himachal Pradesh

Picture of Himachal Pradesh region.

I am in my second year of my MA course in Departement of Linguistics, Delhi University now. It had been 3 months that the new course begun. Again, for my new season now, i have 8 papers, 5 are compulsory and 3 are optional. The compulsory papes are Field Method 1 and 2, Semantics, Intermediate Syntax, and Historical Linguistics. Meanwhile, the optinal papers thta i take are Developmental Psycholingusitics, Neurolinguistics, and Sociolinguistics. Don't ask me now about all of that stuffs because I don't know for now, i just learn to understand them.

What i'm going to tell you deals with one of my compulsory paper, Field Method 1. For this paper, all of us in my class are going to conduct a research on one variety of Hindi languages spoken in one part of India, Himachal Pardesh called Kinnauri land. And the language name is Kinnauri language as well. For first step, it had been conducted a brief note about the language by inviting one of the native speake of the language. He is a very nice young man, always smiles in every occations i meet him. He gives information as detail as he can.

This brief introduction is conducted in our class from last 2 months until now. What we were doing in the class were listing a group of words then as him to pronounce them one by one, then all of us wrote the phonetic transcription of what he had pronounced. I named this stage as word list stage. Then, we continued to next stage, simple sentences formation. This stage was beginning by figuring out the pronoun system of the language, for instance, what the pronoun of 'I, you, they, we' etc. in his language. After knowing the pronuoun system of the language, we tried to make sentences using every different pronuoun to see the system of grammar of the language. And the show is going on until now.

Now, we are going to conduct the research directly to the place where the language is being spoken, in Kinnauri. We are going to interact we other native speaker of the language to summit a more valid data and reference of it. Every one of us has to choose a particular topic of language analysis,in this case the Kinnauri language, such as the noun morphology, verb morphology, agreement of the verb, etc of the language. I myself choose a topic on complex predicate of the language.

The field method itself will be conducted on the 5th-15th October. We will travel by bus for 24 hours. You know, 24 hours. What i trip! I can't imagine what i'm going to do during the trip. I cant't tell you more about the trip now, maybe latter after i come back from that study trip, i'll tell you. Just pray for me for being able to finish this research. See you.