Visibility Dependency of Morphosyntactic Variations: A Study on Malabar Mappila Malayalam

Abstract

The paper introduces the concept of ‘visibility’ of the linguistic variant and looks at how it influences language variation by examining the morphosyntactic variations in the discourses in Mappila Malayalam, a sociolect of Malayalam spoken by the Muslim community in Northern Kerala, India namely Mappilas. The study maps the variations in serial verb constructions, case marking, and the perfect aspect marker within the socio-historical context of Mappila Malayalam. The paper also develops towards a theoretical understanding of variation based on the visibility of the variants. Throughout, I observe the variants in Mappila Malayalam that contribute to a unique identity of the community and its extended variations. As such, I adopt a Labovian framework and included aspects of discourse analysis. I advance the work on sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology by discussing the development of a progressive model of variation, while further evidencing that the structure of the variation and social factors conjointly promote further variation concurrently dependent on the visibility of the variant, while considering instances from Mappila Malayalam.