158 Bemarhs hy Dr. Hoernle and Nawah Ahdul Latif. [Dec, 



but this phenomenon might be observed also in other dialects, and curi- 

 ously enough it was found of the greatest frequency in the extreme west, 

 in the Sindhi and Panjabi ; so that here the dialects of the furthest east 

 and the furthest west most nearly approximated. 



Nawab Abdul Latif Khan Bahadur said : — Mr. Pargiter is deserving 

 of the best thanks of this meeting for the very interesting paper which 

 he has read this evening. He has taken great pains in enquiring into, 

 and collecting information regarding, the shape which the Bengali lan- 

 guage has assumed in the district of Chittagong. If similar enquiries 

 were made by gentlemen residing in the other districts of Bengal, the 

 various forms which the vernacular has taken in those districts, would 

 show a most interesting and instructive state of affairs. What has 

 struck me much is the way in which the Bengali language has become 

 gradually more and more corrupted, the further you go in all directions 

 from the district of Nuddea, the seat of pure Bengali. 



While on this subject, it would not perhaps be uninteresting, if I 

 mention my own experience of the various forms which the Urdu lan- 

 guage has assumed in various parts of India. It seems to me that the 

 principle is exactly the same as in the case of the Bengali already 

 noticed by me. The chief seat of Urdu is Delhi and the further the dis- 

 tance from Delhi, the more and more corrupted does the Urdu language 

 become. As it travels northwards, it gets mixed up with the Gurmukhi 

 and Pushto in the Panjab and the Frontier districts, and loses its purity. 

 Towards the south-west it passes through Rajputana, and becommg mixed 

 up with the Marwari Nagari gets more and more corrupted until it reaches 

 the Province of Sindh, and there getting mixed up with Sindhi, assumes 

 the worst form. Travelling towards the south, it passes through Gwa- 

 liar and Indore in Central India, and reaches Bombay via Baroda, and 

 thus becomes mixed up with iSTagri, Gujrati, and Marhatti, thereby 

 entirely losing its integrity. It then travels further south towards 

 Hydrabad and Madras, and assumes the worst form by getting mixed up 

 with Canarese, Telugu and Tamil. In some of the districts around 

 Delhi, the Urdu preserves its integrity to a certain extent, with some 

 slight but quite perceptible corruptions. In travelling south-east, 

 towards Bengal, it becomes mixed up with the Braj Bhasha of Muttra, 

 the Nagri of various forms all along the south-eastern confines of Behar, 

 and finally with the Bengali language, becoming more and more cor- 

 rupted the further it moves from Delhi. Of all the cities at a dis- 

 tance from Delhi, Lakhnau, Murshidabad and Dacca have kept up the 

 Urdu in a much purer condition than other places. The Urdu of Bombay 

 is very bad, and that of Hydrabad and Madras even worse. In my 



