The Adilabad dialect of the Southern Gondi language is spoken by approximately 185,000 Gonds, or Koitor as they call themselves, in the district of Adilabad (Andhra Pradesh, India). Though written here in the Telugu script, one can clearly see that the Gondi language is very distinct from Telugu. An interesting feature is the high level of borrowing from the neighbouring Indo Aryan languages, Hindi and Marathi.

More than 30 years ago, two scholars worked on the grammar of this dialect of Gondi: Dr. Neville John Lincoln, Cornell University, wrote A Descriptive Analysis of the Adilabad Dialect of Gondi and P. S. Subrahmanyam, Annamalai University, wrote A Descriptive Grammar of Gondi. This lexicon is based on, but not limited to, the wordlists contained in these two publications. Hundreds of example sentences with their meaning translated into English have been added to illustrate usage of the language.

It is our intention to continue working on this resource: including more example sentences, adding more culture-specific images, including translation into Hindi and Telugu of the words and illustrative sentences of each entry. We are very much aware of the limitations of this trial publication. In particular, the Hindi meanings which were automatically generated by the the computer have not been checked, and therefore some entries may contain a wrongly translated sense. These will be corrected in subsequent releases.

We have yet to come across a comprehensive Southern Gondi (Adilabad) lexicon which could be used in schools and in order to encourage local writers to be more actively involved in committing their cultural stories, beliefs, and local history to paper. In order to preserve the language, and encourage vernacular literature development, it is imperative to increase the number of words contained in this lexicon and to add detailed descriptions for the more obscure words.

Our hope and prayer is that this lexicon will be an important step toward long-term language and culture preservation which ought to go hand in hand with development and modernisation.

Mark and Joanna Penny with Pendur Durnath Rao Mancherial, India, 12^th February 2005        (last updated: 17^th May 2008)

Southern Gondi Links - SIL Ethnologue - PDF Downloads

Classification: Dravidian, South-Central, Gondi-Kui, Gondi.

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