Language Vitality, Attitude and Endangerment: Understanding from Field Work among Lodha Speakers

Abstract

Lodhas are marginalized scheduled tribe groups in West Bengal, India. They are called as criminal tribes till the revocation of the Criminal Tribes’ Act of 1952. Lodha is an Indo-Aryan language, spoken by Lodhas in some villages of West Bengal, India. This paper has four objectives. First, this paper discussed about the effect of the dominant languages. Here we made an attempt to study the impact of Bangla influencing on Lodha language. This paper also talks about Language attitude of this community. To grow up their economy now they try to interact with the non-tribal Indo-Aryan population and they try to forget their own language. So we will discuss in detail their language attitude to know the present condition of Lodha. We discuss the socio-economic condition of Lodha. How this condition creates a barrier against them, we will discuss this in our paper by exemplified the situation. At last, this paper is to assess the nature and degree of language endangerment of Lodha based on UNESCO’s Language Vitality and Endangerment framework.