A Grammatical Sketch of Asur: A N orth M unda language (2020)

Abstract: Asur belongs to North Munda sub-branch of Austro-Asiatic languages which now has less than 10,000 speakers. This is a very first attempt at describing and documenting Asur language, therefore the approach of this paper is descriptive rather than that of answering research questions. The paper attempts to describe the grammatical features such as gender, number, case, pronouns, tense-aspect-mood, negation, question formation, etc. of Asur language. It briefly touches upon the morphosyntactic and typological features of Asur, with the intent to present a concise overview of the language, which has so far remained almost untouched by documentary linguistics.

## introduction the population of asur (iso-639-3) speakers in 2007 was 7,000 @xcite . uneso (atlas of the world's languages in danger, 2010) has classified asur language as a 'definitely endangered' one. asur is also known as asuri and ashree. asur, ho and mundari are mutually intelligible as they belong from the group of kherwarian languages. ## data collection and methodology data for the present work has been recorded from native asur speakers living in bishunpur block, gumla district in jharkhand in india. data was recorded mostly through interview method. audio recorders were used for data recording; the audio files were segmented, transcribed and translated using (saymore) software, which was also used for handling metadata related to asur fieldwork and data collection, for analysis of data @xcite software was used (commonly known as flex). for transcription ipa (international phonetic alphabet); and interlinear glossing was followed for annotation, along with free translation in english. ## other typological features of asur asur has basic word order sov. the knowledge of constituent orderings in a language is essential to form grammatical utterances in that language. ## borrowing most of the native speakers of asur are multilingual. asur speakers are in constant contact with other family of languages like indo aryan (sadri and hindi) and dravidian (kurux). asur speakers frequently use not only hindi and sadri noun loan words, but also copular forms like /heke/ or /hake/ (kavita kiran). many hindi and sadri verbs have been accommodated in asur lexicon. the sound /-ao/ is added to the borrowed verb root to form asur verb root or infinitive verb in asur @xcite . as asur is in close proximity with other languages, the study of contact situation and borrowings from other languages into asur would be interesting. ## conclusion the paper is intended to put forth a brief sketch of asur grammar; there is significant scope for further work on comprehensive grammar and lexicon for the documentation of asur language. a comprehensive grammar and documentation work would open up possibilities for further research based on the existing asur data and analysis. a conclusive work on sociolinguistic variations would require a larger number of native speakers from different age groups, gender and regions. there is scope for extensive study on linguistic variation of asur language. there is an immense scope to investigate it historically in the context of proto munda reconstruction, and also to conduct a comparative study of asur with other neighboring languages and munda languages.