Korku (also known as Kurku, or Muwasi[3]) is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Korku people of central India, in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. It is isolated in the midst of the Gondi people, who are Dravidian, while its closest relatives are in eastern India. It is the westernmost Austroasiatic language.
The name Korku comes from Koro-ku (-ku is the animate plural), Koro 'person, member of the Korku community' (Zide 2008).[5]
Sociolinguistics
The Indian national census of 2011 reported 727,133 people claiming to speak Korku, which is an unscheduled language according to the Indian system.[6] However, Korku is classified as “vulnerable” by UNESCO, the least concerning of the levels of language endangerment nonetheless.[7] Most adult men are bilingual in Hindi, or multilingual in Hindi and the local Dravidian languages (Zide 2008: 156). Literacy in the language is low.[1]
Throughout recent history, the use of the Korku language has been heavily influenced by larger hegemonic languages, especially Hindi. A few Korku-speaking groups have had relative success in increasing the viability of their dialect, specifically the Potharia Korku from the Vindhya Mountains.[8]
Dialects
Zide (2008:256) lists two dialects for Korku, a Western and an Eastern one. The Western Dialect, which has a handful of subdialects is also called Korku. Among the Western varieties, the one spoken in Lahi is notable for its loss of the dual number.
Korku has a large consonant phoneme inventory,[10] in which stops occur in several places of articulation. Like many languages of India, Korku stops distinguish between voiced, plain voiceless, and voiceless aspirated consonants.
Korku is a highly agglutinating, suffixing language. It has postpositions, a case system, a two-gender system, and three numbers. The verb phrase can be complex in Korku; functions that in English and other languages may be encoded in by the use of auxiliary verbs and of prepositions may be expressed in Korku through suffixation.
Adjectives are expressed verbally - as intransitive verbs - with the exception of a few cases in which a separate word occurs before the noun they are modifying.[3]
Korku distinguishes three grammatical numbers: singular, dual (two of X), and plural (three or more of X) for nouns in the animate class. Nouns in the inanimate class are rarely marked for number. Final vowels are sometimes deleted before dual or plural endings (see the example at koɾo).[10][2]
Singular
Dual
Plural
konɟe-Ø
‘daughter’
konɟe-kiɲ
‘two daughters’
konɟe-ku
‘daughters’
koɾo
‘man’
koɾkiɲ
‘two men’
koɾku
‘men’
siʈa
‘dog’
siʈakiɲ
‘two dogs’
siʈaku
‘dogs’
Case system
In Korku, the function of participants in a sentence (e.g. agent, patient, etc.) is expressed through grammatical case markings on nouns. Additionally, ideas that are expressed via prepositions in English (e.g. towards, from, with, etc.) are also expressed via case markings in Korku. The table below illustrates the different cases and the suffixes used to express them.[10][3]
Additionally, Korku regularly marks direct object on the verb, as in other Munda languages.[3] In the sentence below, the suffix /eɟ/ on the verb compound /senɖawkʰen/ indicates that it was someone else who was given permission to go.
Personal pronouns in Korku show different number and gender patterns depending on the person. The first person (“I, we”) distinguishes not only the three numbers but also whether the hearer is included (“all of us”) or excluded (“us, but not you”) in the communicative context. The second person (“you, you all”) only encodes number, whereas the third person (“s/he, they”) distinguishes gender, and number for animate nouns.
Singular
Dual
Plural
1st person
Inclusive
iɲɟ
alaŋɟ
abuɲ
Exclusive
aliɲɟ
ale
2nd person
aːm
apinɟ
ape
3rd person
Animate
ɖic ~ in
ɖikinɟ
ɖiku
Inanimate
ɖiː
Demonstratives
In Korku, demonstratives (e.g. “this, that, those”) encode not only distance (e.g. “here and there”) but also gender and number. Unlike English, which only distinguishes between a single proximal (this) and distal (that) spatial references, Korku demonstratives encode four levels of proximity to the speaker (i.e. ‘very close’ vs. ‘close’ vs. ‘far’ vs. ‘very far’), plus a fifth distinction, when one is pinpointing.[10] The table below illustrates the forms used in Korku.
Gender
Number
Distance
Proximal
Distal
Very close
Close
Far
Very far
Pinpointing
Inanimate
Singular
ni
ini / noːɟe
ɖi
ha / hu / ho
huɟɟe
Animate
Singular
nic
inic
ɖic
huc / huɟ / huɟe
hoːɟe
Dual
niɲɟ
inkiɲɟ / noːkiɲɟ
ɖikiɲɟ
huɟkiɲɟ
hoːkiɲɟ
Plural
niku
inku / noːku
ɖiku
huɟku
hoːku
Lexicon
Numerals
The basic cardinal numbers from 1 to 10 (transcribed in IPA) are:
1
miɲaʔ
2
bari
3
apʰai
4
apʰun
5
monoe
6
tuɾui
7
ei
8
ilaɾ
9
aɾei
10
gel
Numbers after 11 are mainly of Indo-Aryan origin.[13]
Kinship terms
As with many Austroasiatic languages, Korku has several words to refer to members of one's family, including the extended family and in-laws. There are often separate terms for people depending on their gender and seniority, for instance /bawan/ “wife's older brother” and /kosɾeʈ/ “elder brother's son”. In the tables below, words that include the suffix -/ʈe/ refer to someone else's family member, so that /kon/ means “my son”, whereas /konʈe/ is used when talking about someone else's son, for instance /ɖukriaʔ konʈe/ “the old woman's son”.[10]
^Cust, R. N. "Grammatical Note and Vocabulary of the Language of the Kor-ku, a Kolarian Tribe in Central India." The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. no. 2 (1884): 164 - 179. JSTOR25196986
^Sengupta, Papia. "Endangered Languages: Some Concerns." Economic And Political Weekly. no. 32 (2009): 17-19. JSTOR25663414
^"Korku". UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in danger. UNESCO. Retrieved 2018-03-18.
Anderson, Gregory D. S. (ed.), The Munda languages. Routledge Language Family Series 3.New York: Routledge. ISBN0-415-32890-X.
Nagaraja, K. S. (1999). Korku language: grammar, texts, and vocabulary. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Zide, Norman H. (1963). Korku noun morphology. [Chicago: South Asian Languages Program, University of Chicago.
Zide, Norman H. (1960). Korku verb morphology. [S.l: s.n.]
Zide, Norman H. (2008). "Korku". In Gregory D. S. Anderson (ed.), The Munda languages, 256–298. Routledge Language Family Series 3. New York: Routledge. ISBN0-415-32890-X.