Innovation in Language Learning
Reading Lost Practices Through Lexicons of Sarwaria Bhojpuri
Prithvi Raj, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Goa (India)
Abstract
Language serves as one of the most significant achievements of human culture, acting as a crucial cultural carrier for a speech community. Beyond their literal denotative definitions, words express profound connotative meanings and social history. This study investigates the lost vocabulary of Sarwaria Bhojpuri, a variety of the Bhojpuri language belonging to the Bihari subgroup of the Indo-Aryan family, spoken primarily across the Basti district and the western region of Gorakhpur. Adopting an ethnographic approach, sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with male and female informants across diverse ethnic backgrounds. The inquiry yielded more than fifty abandoned lexical items that detail social stratification, marital customs, kinship systems, and manual agricultural methodologies. For example, terms such as /ut̪əɾəhɑ/ and /d̪əkʰinəhɑ/ trace historical geographical residence distinctions that previously restricted intermarriage, though these boundaries have now blurred. Similarly, terms like /bətʃəkɑniː d̪ʰot̪i/ point to historical practices of child marriage, whereas /beɖiː/, /lɑd̪iː/, /tʃəŋəɾiː/, and /pədʒəwɑ/ document traditional agricultural labor and manual brick-making practices. Although forgotten by younger generations, these words remain embedded in the memory of older speakers, revealing undocumented narratives of social solidarity, shared history, and cultural evolution.
Keywords: Sarwaria Bhojpuri, Social History, Culture, Sociolinguistics, Lexicon, Language Change
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