Books in the Mouton-CASL Grammar Series series

Bangla is spoken as the majority language in Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India, and as a minority language in several other Indian states. With almost 200 million native speakers, it ranks among the top ten languages in the world in number of speakers. Based on both primary and secondary materials, the CASL Bangla grammar provides comprehensive coverage of the phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax of Bangla. Plentiful examples of naturally-occurring sentences provide native orthography, Romanization, and morpheme-by-morpheme glossing along with free translations. Unlike many Romanizations of Bangla, our system eschews Sanskritic influence and instead reflects actual Bangla phonology. We also offer comparative information of use to linguists, highlighting features of Bangla shared with the South Asian sprachbund, such as light verb constructions, as well as those that differentiate Bangla from its Indo-Aryan relatives; for example, its unique NP structure.Written in an accessible style from a theory-neutral perspective, this work will be of use to linguistic researchers, language scholars, and students of Bangla. A formal grammar focusing on the morphology is an available companion work.

dhivehi (Maldivian), the national language of the Maldives, has received very little attention in the linguistic literature. With Sinhala (Sinhalese) Dhivehi constitutes a branch of the Indo-Aryan languages that shows a number of features unusual within the Indo-Aryan group, such as a lack of contrastive aspiration, prenasalized stops, and a lack of relative pronouns. Dhivehi also displays features unknown to Sinhala, such as a nonverbal copula and an associative plural, as well as its own unique alphabet, Thaana.Based on both fieldwork and corpus research, this grammar provides comprehensive coverage of the phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax of standard written and spoken Dhivehi. The plentiful examples provide native Thaana orthography, Roman transliteration, and morpheme-by-morpheme glossing along with free translations.Written in an accessible style from a theory-neutral perspective, this work will be of use to linguistic researchers, language scholars, and students of Dhivehi.