Dhivehi

[James Gair]

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 I composed this before I looked at some other replies, so there is some
redundancy, but I will send it as is to save time. There is a fair amount
of information on Dhivehi,  and I am surprised that France's student could
not find any, though some is a bit out of the way.. Perhaps she did not
check alternate spellings and under "Maldivian". (See the Ethnologue list).

A PhD thesis has just been completed here (at Cornell) by Bruce Cain. It
runs to 350+ pages and includes an introduction which does have some
sociolinguistic information, a quite complete grammatical sketch, and an
extensive section on the history of the language, particularly in relation
to its relation to Sinhala. It will be in Dissertation Abstracts, but it
probably won't be in microfilm just yet. It does include a sizeable
bibliography.

A descriptive sketch by Bruce and me is in the works in the Lincom
Descriptive Series, and is just about to go to press (I expect it to be in
final form within the next two weeks--only some last-minute editing and
firming up the crc. remain ).

There is also a published bibliography on the Maldives by CHB Reynolds
(Clio Press, Oxford, 1993) and he has also produced some published papers.
In addition, there is considerable work done in Sri Lanka, especially by
J.B. Disanayaka and G.B. Wijayawardhana.

There is also a book on people of the Maldives by Clarence Maloney, which
does include a fair amount of significant information on the language
(critiqued in Cain's dissertation).

I have not mentioned the pioneering studies by Wilhelm Geiger (in German
and English) which include a monograph, an etymological glossary, and a
number of papers. There are also, the important works  by HCP Bell. Some of
this has been published in Malé by the National Centre for Linguistic and
Historical Research. Some appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society/Ceylon Branch), or was published separately.

 I don't have a full bibliography to hand to distribute, but this is at
least a start, and with it, a fair amount of information should be rather
simple to /find.

James W Gair