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Posted on 10/31/2026 2:06:42 PM PDT by Cronos
Peggy Mohan’s new book Father Tongue, Mother Land: The Birth of Languages in South Asia (published by Penguin Random House in 2025) can be seen as a sequel to her earlier work Wanderers, Kings and Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages (2021), where she explored the development of languages in India while looking into the waves of migration of ‘men’ into the subcontinent from the ancient times. In her new work, Peggy is looking into a more remote past to get to the root of the modern Indian languages.
Peggy Mohan sketches a historical picture of the emergence of ‘Dakhini’ in the Hyderabad region in the 12th and 13th centuries which she calls ‘a language in the twilight zone’. Dakhini shares most of its vocabulary with Urdu but in grammar, it is close to Telugu which is its substratum language. A substratum is the source through which a new language gets its base. Dakhini lacks ergativity which means that we cannot change an active sentence in the language to a passive sentence by adding a subject marker as we do in Hindi. This is a characteristic of all Dravidian languages. But Dakhini also has grammatical gender which makes it close to Indo – Aryan languages.
Peggy devotes a large part of ‘Father Tongue, Mother Land’ to finding the skeleton of ‘language X’ which according to her can be credited with being the substratum of all languages that have emerged in India in the past thousand years. To get to language X, Peggy analyses a number of languages that are now found in the Indus Valley Region. She studies the language structure of Burushaski, Brahui, Pashto, Punjabi, etc. and she reaches some conclusions about the structure of her language X.
(Excerpt) Read more at doingsociology.org ...
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Thanks for the topic!
Met a missionary to India recently. He shared there are 120+ languages throughout the country.
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