37.1117, Reviews: A Descriptive Grammar of Ollari Gadaba: Mendem Bapuji & Panchanan Mohanty (2025)

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Subject: 37.1117, Reviews: A Descriptive Grammar of Ollari Gadaba: Mendem Bapuji & Panchanan Mohanty (2025)

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Date: 18-Mar-2026
From: Sanford B Steever [sbsteever at yahoo.com]
Subject: Language Documentation: Mendem Bapuji & Panchanan Mohanty (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-846

Title: A Descriptive Grammar of Ollari Gadaba
Series Title: Languages of the World/Materials 518
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Lincom GmbH
           https://lincom-shop.eu/
Book URL:
https://lincom-shop.eu/epages/57709feb-b889-4707-b2ce-c666fc88085d.sf/de_DE/?ObjectPath=/Shops/57709feb-b889-4707-b2ce-c666fc88085d/Products/%22ISBN%209783969390740%22

Author(s): Mendem Bapuji & Panchanan Mohanty

Reviewer: Sanford B Steever

SUMMARY
A Descriptive Grammar of Ollari Gadaba (DGOG) is a revision of Mendem
Bapuji’s 2019 dissertation for the Centre for Applied Linguistics and
Translation Studies at the University of Hyderabad, under the guidance
of Panchanan Mohanty. Ollari Gadaba, spoken in the Koraput district of
Odisha (formerly, Orissa), is a Central Dravidian language, closely
related to Kolami, Naiki and Parji (see Krishnamurti 2003). It is not
to be confused with Gotub Gadaba, a language belonging to the Munda
branch of the Austro-Asiatic family. Documentation of Ollari Gadaba
has been sparse, so DGOG is a welcome addition to what we know about
the language.
The Koraput district is a multilingual area where languages from three
families converge: Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Munda. Among the
Dravidian languages, members from the South-Central subgroup are also
found, including Kui and Pengo. All are nonliterary languages, with
minimal institutional or governmental support. The Indo-Aryan (IA)
language Odia (formerly, Oriya) is the official language of Odisha
state while Telugu is the official language of the neighboring
Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states. (Urdu, in its Dakkhini form, is
also the second language of Telangana.) One recurring theme in DGOG is
that Ollari Gadaba has been structurally influenced by neighboring
languages, particularly Odia and, to a lesser extent, Telugu; many
illustrations of Ollari Gadaba in the text are accompanied by
equivalents in these two languages for ready cross-reference.
Chapter One (pp. 1-15) situates Ollari Gadaba within its geographical,
economic and social contexts. It takes pains to disentangle the knot
of labels that have been applied to a variety of tribes, clans and
languages in the district and surrounding areas.
Chapter Two (pp. 16-41) takes up phonology, covering the basic
inventory of phonemes, phoneme combinations, some phonological
processes, and syllable structure. Noted in passing are the sporadic
features of vowel nasalization and consonant aspiration, which are yet
to be truly contrastive in the language. Throughout DGOG, the bilabial
semi-consonant /w/ is sometimes represented by w and sometimes by v,
but there is no phonemic distinction.
Chapter Three (pp. 42-109), the longest in the book, treats
morphology, including nouns (pp. 42-74), verbs (pp. 74-104), adverbs
(104-107) and postpositions (108-109). The section on nouns includes
discussion of such categories as gender, number and case, as well as
adjectives and nominal compounds. Number, in particular, has a robust,
diverse allomorphy with far more distinctions than are reconstructable
to Proto-Dravidian. The discussion of plural formation reveals to the
attentive reader that Ollari Gadaba has a process of anaptyxis, a
feature of the Central Dravidian subgroup, that appears in such
alternations as singular kuyug ‘tie’ versus plural kuygul ‘ties’,
where a vowel is inserted to break up an otherwise impermissible
cluster (i.e., * -yg#). Neither the phonology nor the morphology
chapters note this process, even though Bhattacharya (1957) and
Bhaskararao (1980) do.
Though not mentioned in Chapter Three, later examples (pp. 110-12)
show that under certain circumstances, nouns may also mark the
category of person: predicate nominals may take subject-predicate
agreement markers, a feature of other Dravidian languages such as Old
Tamil and Modern Telugu. DGOG presents the accusative (pp. 61-2) and
dative (pp. 62-3) as separate cases, but then notes a syncretism
between the two. Proper segmentation of the forms in the nominal
paradigm would have led to a single dative-accusative case. The
existing dative-accusative case allomorphs most likely descend from an
original Proto-Dravidian dative case. Unaccountably, postpositions,
which pattern with and supplement case marking, appear in a separate
section (pp. 108-09).
The section on verbs treats permissible stems, complex stems, finite
forms, and nonfinite forms. The discussion of simple stems lists both
nag- ‘laugh’ and nāg- ‘laugh’; however, only inflected forms of the
former are ever shown (p. 81). Rather than being an allomorph, I
suspect that nāg- is probably just an error. Compound stems are
mentioned on page 74, but not illustrated there; an example happens to
appear on page 78, sai-sey-o-ṇḍṇ ḍ‘he died [die-go-PST-3SM]. Page 74
notes that verbs inflect for such categories as tense, aspect and
mood, but omits polarity. Instead, polarity is included in a list of
forms marked for mood (pp. 94-5), including the past negative,
non-past negative and prohibitive paradigms. Some of the forms
labelled as aspectual are transparently Auxiliary Compound Verbs while
others appear to be contracted forms of such compounds. They seem less
oriented toward a category of aspect (partitioning an event into an
onset, body and coda) and more toward the temporal duration of the
event named by the verb base.
Probabilitative mood (pp.97-8) is clumsily described: “[t]he verb root
is followed by /nakin/.” In fact, nakin is an adverb that occupies the
second constituent position in a sentence (something akin to a
Wagernackel position) with a non-past tense verb which appears at the
end of the sentence in accordance with Ollari Gadaba canonical word
order. However, nakin is in no way morphologically part of that verb.
DGOG says that nakin had the original meaning ‘come’, but that does
not correspond to any Dravidian verb, e.g. *var-/vā- ‘come’; instead,
it appears to be a collocation of two Indo-Aryan function words, na
‘not’ + ki ‘or’ (the final n has yet to be explained), with the
combination of ‘(X) or not X’ and nonpast tense giving rise to the
meaning ‘possibly/probably will V’.
Clitics are discussed in the section on noun morphology (pp. 67-8)
even though examples in the text show that they also apply to verbs
and sentences, as well; accordingly, a separate, more prominent
section of its own is indicated.
Notably, as in Konekor Gadaba (Bhaskararao 1980), the dubitative
clitic =ki ‘whether, or’ has been borrowed from Odia and has displaced
the native clitic *=ō ‘or, any, whether’ (it might easily be recruited
to Chapter Five as a further example of convergence).
Chapter Four (pp. 110-121) very briefly sketches syntax. It contrasts
simple and compound sentences. Simple sentences divide into those with
predicate nominals and those with finite verbs. Missing from the
discussion, however, is any mention of such complex sentence
structures as relative clauses and matrix-complement structures, both
well attested in other Dravidian languages and often the locus of
change in linguistic convergence in such nonliterary languages as
Parji (Central Dravidian) and Kurux (North Dravidian). The syntax of
reflexives, reciprocals and conditional sentences is taken up in
Chapter Five, but not discussed in Chapter Four.
Chapter Five (pp. 122-135) discusses Convergence, particularly with
Odia. The chapter concentrates on several syntactic structures thought
to result from convergence. Extensive lexical borrowing, though
evident from the texts, is restricted to a brief analysis of numerals.
There is no discussion of potential phonological convergence although
a case might be made that the sporadic nasalization of vowels and
aspiration of consonants imitates features present in Odia. The
chapter makes clear that Ollari Gadaba is adapting linguistic features
from Odia, departing from the Dravidian template represented by
Telugu.
One lamentable gap in coverage is the lack of continuous texts that
might provide us with illustrations of the various isolated forms and
constructions in use. Both Bhattacharya (1957) and Bhaskararao (1980)
include texts to display the language in context. Also, a subject
index would have been helpful.
EVALUATION
DGOG is a worthy addition to the scant literature on this nonliterary
Dravidian language, which belongs to the least studied subgroup of the
Dravidian family. Only two other monographs treat this rarely studied
language: Bhattacharya (1957) and Bhaskararao (1980) take up closely
related dialects, the latter spoken in Andhra Pradesh where Telugu is
the official state language.
Though primarily a descriptive grammar, DGOG includes material
pertinent to historical and typological linguistics, especially
through its comparisons of Ollari Gadaba with Odia and Telugu.
In terms of convergence, Ollari Gadaba is changing toward the model
provided by Odia and away from the type represented by Telugu. This is
to be expected since Odia is the official language of Odisha, where
Ollari Gadaba is spoken (this naturally invites comparison with
Konekor Gadaba, spoken across the border in Andhra Pradesh where
Telugu is the official language). There appear to be traces of a
vigesimal number system, which is characteristic of Munda languages.
However, only the word for ‘twenty’ is borrowed from Munda; the terms
for ‘one’ to ‘three’ are inherited from Dravidian while those above
are borrowed from Indo-Aryan. There is also a small system of numeral
classifiers, with borrowings from Odia, e.g. the classifier gota
‘thing’ for inanimate nouns.
In phonology, Ollari Gadaba is “experimenting” with the adaptation of
certain features from Odia, notably nasalization of vowels and
aspiration of consonants. All Odia vowels (except o) have nasal
counterparts which may be—but are not always—contrastive in that
language. Aspiration is clearly phonemic in Odia, but sporadic in
Ollari Gadaba and not yet contrastive. Both the spontaneous
nasalization and aspiration one finds might be considered
“decorative,” perhaps an attempt by speakers to assimilate to the
relatively higher prestige of Odia. All this is suggestive of a
promising follow-on sociolinguistic study.
It is also hoped that future research will be able to collect a
variety of texts. It is no easy task as this part of Central India
presents some issues over accessibility and security. Campaigns by the
government against insurgents, as well as the highest rate of death in
elephant-human encounters in the country, tend to raise concerns over
personal safety.
Nonetheless, the collection and publication of further texts will
clarify and illuminate various aspects of this under-studied language,
and could also form the basis for preparing teaching materials to
promote mother-tongue literacy.
The references include the first edition of “The Dravidian Languages,”
which I first edited in 1998, and which includes a chapter on Konekor
Gadaba by P. Bhaskararao. Interested readers of DGOG may wish to
consult the second edition (2020), which includes some minor
corrections to that chapter.
REFERENCES
Bhattacharya, S. 1957. Ollari, A Dravidian Speech. Memoir No. 3.
Delhi: Manager of Publications.
Bhaskararao, P. 1980. Konekor Gadaba, A Dravidian Language. Pune:
Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute.
Krishnamurti, Bh. 2003. The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Steever, Sanford B. 2020. The Dravidian Languages, 2nd edition.
London: Routledge.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sanford Steever is an independent scholar specializing in Dravidian
languages and linguistics. Among his recent books are “The Dravidian
Languages, 2nd Edition” (Routledge, 2020) and “The Syntactic Typology
of the Dravidian Languages” (Dravidian Linguistics Association, 2017).



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