Phonology and Morphology of Koya Language

Abstract

The Koya language is the mother-tongue of Koya people, a tribal community related to Gonds. The Koya people refer themselves as KOYITOR. Census of India, 1971 gives the number of Koya speakers at country level to be 1,40,776 among which the speakers from Andhra Pradesh are reported to be 108657. The number of speakers in Orissa is 31052. The Koya people mainly live in the regions of Khammam, East and West Godavari, Adilabad and Warangal forests as well as in the plains villages. In Linguistic Survey of India vol IV, a specimen of KOI is given by G A Grierson. Grierson grouped the Koya language under Gondi dialects. Koya language, a number of central Dravidian languages, shows extensive lexical borrowing from the contiguous Telugu language. Hitherto the Koya tribe main occupation has been podu cultivation where the land is cultivated for only one year. The language does not have any writing system or written literature but the women, children and rarely men sing number of folk songs with different styles. Koya has ten vowel pheonemes, comprising of equal number of short and long vowels. In koya a noun phrase may be a noun or pronoun with or without one or more attributives qualifying it. In this report the morphology of the nouns, pronouns and their attributives will be discussed. Adjectives, demonstratives, numerals and other attributive nouns will be dealt under this noun phrase. Noun and its further inflection in Koya is interesting for its various processes employed particularly in pluralization. As the canonical forms of the nouns are concerned, there are monosyllabic, disyllabic, trisyllabic, tetrasyllabic and pentasyallabic phonological words. The verb stems are either simple or complex or compound. All tribes in Koya fall into two categories i.e finite and non-finite. There are adverbs of place, time, manner and quantity and corresponding interrogative adverbs in Koya. Onomatopoeic expression, these expressions indicate the actions they refer by imitating in sound. The actions they indicate may be the movement of an animate being or the sudden fall of man etc. The study emphasis on connectives and clitics. This report also included list of vocabulary of the Koya language.