Dialect Continuum in the Bhil Tribal Belt: Grammatical Aspects

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine the dialect continuum in the Bhil tribal belt of western India, using it as the basis for a comparative grammatical study of the Indo-Aryan language family. The ‘Bhili language’ refers to a group of up to fifty identified dialects with differing degrees of mutual intelligibility, and contains a great deal of fluctuation in terms of case marking on core arguments.