7fi Ainiunl Address. . [Feb. 



The lists for flie Lower Provinces of Beng^al, comprising Bengal Proper, 

 Bihar and Orissa, for the Central and North-West Provinces and Ondh. 

 and for the Panjab are complete and in the Press, while those for 

 RfTjputana and Assam are nearly ready, but have not yet been sent to 

 Press. 



Dr. Grierson has been good enough to permit me to inspect ad- 

 vanced proofs of those portions which are in the Press. I am thus in 

 a position to explain the composition of the two parts of the Rough List, 

 In the first part, languages are arranged according to local areas. Each 

 local area, or district, is taken in order, and each languao-e spoken in 

 it, together with the estimated number of speakers, is stated, family 

 by family, as it occurs. Languages, indigenous to the distj-ict and 

 those spoken in it by non-domiciled immigrants, are distinguished by a 

 difference in the piinted type. The second part is like a reversing 

 dictionary. Here languages are arranged according to families and 

 groups, and under each dialect is recorded the name of each local area 

 in which it is spoken. Here too a difference in the arrangement 

 indicates the localities of the dialects spoken by the settled and the 

 immigrant populations. 



These lists are being prepared with as great regard for accuracy as 

 is possible, bnt they have the defects of their origin. The original 

 returns have been prepared by persons with local knowledge, but who 

 do not pretend to be philologists. They may be taken as repre- 

 senting what intelligent local people consider to be the languages 

 of their own neio^hbourhood. They give names, but they are names 

 only. We are told, for example, that Baggali is spoken in such and 

 such a place, but we are not told what is meant by the word " Baijgali'* 

 It is probably the language which Europeans call Bengali, but it may 

 be something else. In the Central Provinces many thousands of Gonda 

 have abandoned their ancestral language, and now speak a barbarous 

 Hindi. In many cases this has been returned by local officers as Gondi, 

 and it will be necessary, therefore, to test every entry req-arding that 

 language, in order to see whether the language referred to belongs to 

 the Dravidiaii or to the Aryan family of speech. 



The decision of these and similar questions is one for linguistic 

 experts, and it is to provide experts with materials for coming to a 

 decision, and thus to render the survey complete and of scientific 

 value, that the second portion of the scheme has been devised and, it is 

 hoped, will be approved of by the Government of India. As soon as the 

 rough list of a Province is complete, translations into every language, in- 

 digenous to each district, will be called for from each local officer. One 

 standard passage has been selected for these translations, namely the 



