Introduction

This chapter focuses on one of the more exciting results of contact between groups speaking different languages: the birth of new languages to serve the need for intergroup communication. Typically, such languages draw most of their vocabulary from a single lexifier, but their grammar is a result of compromise among the speakers of the lexifier and substrate languages.

With its history as a cultural crossroads, South Asia has naturally provided the types of situations in which new languages might be expected to develop. Very few are reported, however, possibly because they actually do develop rarely, but also because they have traditionally been viewed as marginal phenomena – “bastardized” or “corrupt” versions of language, hence not worthy of study. The known new languages of South Asia, with the exception of Bazaar Hindi, are found around the fringes of the subcontinent and represent contacts with languages beyond the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian dominated heartland. A brief survey of the known new languages follows; later in this chapter, we will look at their linguistic characteristics.

Nagamese

The mountainous terrain of Nagaland (See Maps 12.1 and 12.2 on pp. 267, 268) has led, as in Papua New Guinea, to a large number of languages in a small area – a “choʈaasaa kintu bahubhaaʂii pradeʃ” (Kumar 1978: 1). Just as the people of Papua New Guinea embraced Tok Pisin, the Nagas have adopted Nagamese, an Assamese-lexified pidgin, as the chief lingua franca of their state, and it has become creolized as the mother tongue of the (non-Naga) Kachari community.