Amarkantak Gondi Standardization Conference – Day 3

Conference delegate is hard at work logging all of the word variations

CGNet’s involvement with the people of central India has brought it to the Indira Gandhi National Tribal University for the third conference on Gondi language standardization. We will be keeping you updated as events progress here.

Microsoft Excel is, I think, rarely used for a purpose like this. Each of the columns shown above documents a different regional variation of Gondi words: the finished product should resemble a kind of thesaurus of differences throughout Gondi speaking regions. Participants gather in groups to log the variations on the words that they know. After the initial teething problems (organizing laptop chargers, finding the correct files and formats etc.) this is a fairly speedy process: this morning each group got through around forty words in two hours. 

Discussion is essential to this process

The participants are using for reference a basic Gondi-Hindi-Telegu-English dictionary that gives them a framework to build on. Each group is allotted a number of pages and works through the words one by one, giving the Gondi word and its Hindi and Telegu equivalents until a sense of the word is realized and regional variations can be suggested and logged. This dictionary, while essential, importantly lacks the regional variation this conference is trying to pin down: though a useful tool to use, it was compiled using data from only a small area of Telengana, and requires further input from the wider Gondi region to be called truly representative of the language as a whole. 

The Gondi words discussed today cover a wide range of topics: ‘sandal’, ‘silver neck ornament’, ‘bleed’, ‘roof’, ‘storm’, ‘rash’, a word that translates as ‘to uproot many things quickly’ and ‘fishing net’. 

After everyone finished for the afternoon we were treated to a performance by a Gondi dance troupe.

And after that, everybody joined in!