Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics
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Synopsis
This book focuses on the languages spoken by people of South Asian origin living in Britain and is intended to assist individuals in Britain whose work involves them with speakers of these languages. The approach taken is descriptive and practical, offering linguistic, geographic, and historical background information leading to appreciation of the languages and their speakers. The focus is on Bangladesh, Northern India, and Pakistan and on five predominant immigrant languages, including: Panjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. First, the relationship of the languages to Western European languages is examined, and some general characteristics of grammatical structure, sounds, scripts, and vocabularies, are described. Attention is given to the regional origin and present status of the five languages. Finally, the position of these languages in the United Kingdom and the current debate on the inclusion of community languages in the mainstream school curriculum are briefly discussed. Appended materials include notes on Indo-European language correspondences, the language families of the Indian subcontinent, further features of verb grammar in Indo-Aryan languages, and teaching materials for English-speaking learners of the five languages. (MSE)Book Details
Published
June 14, 1985
Publisher
Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research
Pages
49
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780948003103