IS Cust — Non- Ari/ an Lang ling cs of India, [Jan. 



Capt. Tickell, in 1846, published a memorandum on the Holanguage. The 

 Bible has been translated into Kol by the Kev. A. Nothrott. The Rev. J. 

 Whitley, 1873, published a Mundari primer, and he asserts that any person 

 familiar with this dialect will be understood by all Mundari- speaking people, 

 and by the Lurka Kols. Hindi words have largely crept into use, and the 

 struggle to retain this and the other non- Aryan idioms of a poor hilly tract 

 may j^rove vain. 



Two grammars have been published of the Sonthali language, one by 

 the Rev. J. Philips in 1852, and a superior one by the Rev. L. Skrefsrud in 

 1873. Portions of the Bible have been translated into Sonthali. There 

 are vocabularies of other dialects ; but the learned missionaries, who have a 

 Christian flock of thousands, assert that the same language is sj)oken by 

 Sonthals, Munda-Bhumij, and others of the great Kol family, all the way 

 from Orissa to the Rajmahal Hills. In grammatical structure, Sonthali is 

 stated to be as superior to others as Sanskrit to its cognate languages. 

 This bold assertion we are not in a position to test. But the second asser- 

 tion, that the Sonthali is among the non- Aryan languages not even second 

 to the Turkish in grammatical structure, is borne out by the artificial and 

 complex, 3^et simple and transparent, symmetry of its verb- system ; for it 

 appears to j^ossess voice, mood, tense, gender, number, person, case, forms, 

 and conjugations, including five voices, five moods, and twenty-three tenses, 

 three numbers, and four cases. And though the language is unwritten, the 

 surprising fact is stated, that the Nagari alj^habet of fifty letters represents 

 the sounds, neither more nor less, with the single redundancy of v, and there 

 exist common roots for very primitive ideas in Sanskrit and Sonthali. 



It is not presumed that this sketch on a subject so obscure, extending 

 over so vast an area, is exhaustive : no amount of precision can in the present 

 state of our knowledge be obtained : the same tribes are called by different 

 names, and different tribes included in the same nomenclature. It is 

 asserted by some, that such well-known tribes as the Bhils have lost their 

 language : by others that they still preserve it : what is preserved is attribu- 

 ted by some to the Kolarian, by others to the Dravidian family. In K^olha- 

 pur, under the Bombay Grovernment, it is stated that certain dialects exist, 

 and vocabularies are given : thus a question of degree is^oj^ened up : it may 

 be that a language is wholly Aryan, but laden with non-Aryan vocables, the 

 legacy of its extinct predecessor : when does a language end and a dialect 

 begin ? Another still more subtile point remains : it is admitted on all 

 hands, that in the Sanskrit vernaculars there is a large residuum of non- 

 Aryan words, and possibly we may have here tapj^ed the common fount of 

 the vocables of all the languages of India. 



The work of the next quarter of a century is thus cut out, and 

 consists in reducing to the form of practical grammars the leading and most 



