Abstract
AbstractThe Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski. Areality research on this region is only in its early stages, and while its significance as a convergence area has been suggested by several scholars, only a few, primarily phonological and grammatical, features have been studied in a more systematic fashion. Cross-linguistic research in the realms of semantics and lexical organization has been given considerably less attention. However, preliminary findings indicate that features are geographically bundled with one another, across genera, in significant ways, displaying semantic areality on multiple levels throughout the region or in one or more of its sub-regions. The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these. Comparisons are made between the geographical distribution of such patterns and those of some other linguistic features as well as with relevant non-linguistic factors related to shared cultural values or identities and a long history of small-scale cross-community interaction in different parts of the region.
Highlights
The Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, northeastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: IndoAryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski
The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these
In the present areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the Hindu Kush region, I conclude that the geographical distribution of a few differentiating properties of language-specific kinship terminologies in most respects are in line with the distribution of a number of other, previously identified, mainly lexico-semantic, properties
Summary
The Hindu Kush region, the Greater Hindu Kush, or the Hindukush-Karakorum as it has been referred to elsewhere (Heegård Petersen 2015: 23–24; Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Liljegren 2017: 215; Liljegren 2017), is here really a shorthand for the Pamir– Hindukush–Karakorum–Kohistan–Kashmir region (Bashir 2016: 264), an ethnolinguistically rich region, politically divided between Afghanistan, Pakistan and. Contact in that case includes mutual contact between the various Indo-Aryan linguistic communities as well as significant contact with adjacent communities belonging to other genera (Liljegren 2017) This non-committal line is taken here regarding this grouping, and the individual languages will consistently be referred to as Indo-Aryan. The Iranian languages present in the Hindu Kush belong to three separate major groups: Southwest Iranian, represented by various communities that speak a local variety of Dari or Tajik (essentially regional varieties of Farsi); Southeast Iranian, represented by a single minor community, Parachi; East Iranian, represented on the one hand by Pashto, and on the other hand by languages belonging to the Pamir group These latter consist of a number of mainly small communities with a long-standing presence in the northern-most part of the region (in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as in adjacent areas of Tajikistan and China). While the region for quite some time has been referred to as interesting in terms of areality and language contact (Emeneau 1965; Masica 1991: 43, 2001: 259; Skalmowski 1985), and a number of features have been suggested as characteristic (Baart 2014; Bashir 1988: 392–420, 1996, 2003: 821–823, 2016; Èdel’man 1980, 1983: 35–59; Fussman 1972: 389–399; Tikkanen 1999, 2008; Toporov 1970), relatively little detailed and systematic areal-linguistic research on comparable data has been carried out so far
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