A Semantically Classified Vocabulary of Saurashtri

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The book "Semantically classified vocabulary of Saurashtri" is a compilation of 5500 words which are classified under 50 semantic domains. The headwords of the vocabulary are given in Tamil script followed by Saurashtri transliteration in Tamil and Devanagari followed by glosses in English. The distinctive objective of producing this instructional material is to facilitate the learning process of Saurashtri either as a mother tongue or as a second language. The book will also help the learners to understand the synchronic and diachronic aspects of the language from a lexical point of view. Furthermore, it will serve as an important tool in language comprehension, especially for translating technical terms.

L.R. Prem Kumar is currently working as a Lecturer-cum-Junior Research officer in CIIL, Mysuru. He did his MA, MPhil and PhD in Linguistics and MA in Tamil from Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai. He has an experience of conducting extensive fieldwork on Tamil Speech Corpus. He has presented several papers on Tamil language teaching and other sub-disciplines of linguistics. He also has sound knowledge in Natural Language Processing (NLP) especially in the areas of POS tagging, speech segmentation, morphological analysis with special reference to Tamil.

N. Nadaraja Pillai is a former Professor-cum-Deputy Director and the former Controller of Examinations of Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru. He did his MA in Linguistics from Annamalai University and PhD from University of Mysore. He has worked on all the scheduled languages and 14 tribal and minor languages of India for the production of teaching materials. I le has also served as an overseas consultant to the Ministry of Education, Governinent of Singapore and Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius. He has also trained the teachers and teacher educators in Tamil, Sinhala and English in the orientation programmes in Sri Lanka.

Saurashtri is spoken by 2.4 million people as their mother-tongue in India (Census of India, 2011). A number of scholars claim that the language has been derived from Sauraseni, one of the six Prakrit languages of India. Its history dates back to the third century B.C., when Panini the famous grammarian gave Sanskrit grammar. The speakers of this language are Saurashtrians, whose homeland was in the Kathiawar region of Gujarat until the disastrous invasions of Muslims and their religious conversions in the eleventh century forced the natives to migrate to Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and further down south for nearly 800 years ago. Living in all the larger countries of the world now, Saurashtrians have preserved their mother- tongue chiefly as a spoken language although they have a literary heritage of five centuries. The centuries-long intercultural and inter linguistic exchanges in all their migratory locales have significantly changed the colour of their native vocabulary and naturally diminished its distinct communicative power. Unless conscious efforts are taken to resist the onslaughts of the highly influential regional and foreign languages, and unless a concerted linguistic campaign is launched to strengthen the mother-tongue vocabulary, the survival of Saurashtri as a distinct language of millions of people with a rich literary, cultural and spiritual heritage is at stake.

The Central Institute of Indian Languages was set up on 17 July 1969 with a view to assisting and co-ordinating the development of Indian Languages. The major aim of the Institute is to protect and document minor, minority and tribal languages through extensive documenting. The Institute has a long history of providing facilities for the development of not only the major Indian languages but also minor languages as well, especially the un-written languages in India.

The Institute has initiated the 'Semantically classified vocabulary' series in its endeavour to enrich the vocabulary for the development and preservation of the Indian languages. The vocabulary in language is a vital and integral part of language learning. Hence, such books have immense importance in the process of language teaching and learning.