IOR/S/2

These records were made to supplement the Linguistic Survey of’ India, which was set up in 1894 under the supervision of George Grierson. The survey’s aim, not fully realised, was to collect specimens of every known language and dialect covered by its operations. These extended from Baluchistan in the west to Assam in the east; the provinces of Madras and Burma and the states of Hyderabad and Mysore were not included. The results were published in Sir George Abraham Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, 11 vols (Calcutta. 1927).

The survey was intended to serve as a work of reference for both language students and the general reader. However, aware that students of a language needed to hear texts as well as to read them, Grierson arranged with provincial and presidential governments for recordings to be made of the languages spoken within their jurisdictions. The first recordings were made by the Government of Bihar and Orissa in late 1913 or early 1914, the last by the Government of Assam in late 1928 or early 1929. Grierson was unsuccessful in persuading the governments of Kashmir, the Punjab and the North West Frontier to take part, but over the years acquired records from the governments of the Central Provinces, Burma, Bombay, Delhi, the United Provinces, Madras and Bengal. Within each province or presidency, project administration was generally carried out by an official appointed by the Education Department, while the recordings themselves were made by representatives of’ the Gramophone Company, Calcutta, which also produced and distributed the records. Sets were deposited with several organisations including the British Museum, the Royal Asiatic Society, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Bodleian Library, the university libraries of Cambridge, Dublin and Edinburgh, and the Institut de France. While still being collected, the records were demonstrated at scholarly functions and reviewed in the press, and began to be used in language courses for entrants to the Indian Civil Service.

In the linguistic survey, three specimens of each language were collected, one of which was a translation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This text was considered particularly suitable by Grierson as it contained “the three personal pronouns, most of the cases found in the declension of nouns, and the present, past and future tenses of the verb” Linguistic Survey of India, vol.1, p 18. The recordings usually included a rendition of part of the parable, together with a local story or song; the speakers, usually men, came from a range of backgrounds. Some recordings from Bengal of long-established and literary languages were spoken by university students, while samples of lesser-known languages and dialects were recited by villagers, or by any speaker who might be found: ''Some of the tribes like Korwas and Kodakus were so shy that not one of them would consent to leave his home and go to the recording centre. In such a case prisoners of these tribes had to be brought in chains, and the very first recording in this booklet is from the mouth of one undergoing a sentence of rigorous imprisonment for twenty years. Gramophone Records of Languages and Dialects spoken in the Central Provinces and Berar (Madras, 1920) p vii. S/2/2/1 is the recording referred to.

The records have been grouped by their government of origin. Within the groups, they are listed in the order in which they were recorded, indicated by the original reference number. The groups themselves have been listed chronologically, according to the date of their first recordings. Governments usually made the recordings over the space of a few days, but batches were sometimes made at different times. For example, the Government of Bihar and Orissa made fourteen records in late 1913, four in 1914, then, following a request from Grierson to record its Aryan languages, fifteen in 1920.

The spelling of languages and dialects follows that used by Grierson in Appendix III of vol 1, Linguistic Survey, but accents and stress marks have been omitted. Where the appendix gives alternative names and spellings, these have been included. If a title appears on the record label, it is shown in inverted commas; in many cases this gives further information about language spellings. Where no title appears, it has been supplied from notes among Grierson’s correspondence in the S/1 series.

Transcripts and translations of the Parable in each language are primed in the Linguistic Survey. Some transcripts and translations of the other recordings appear in India Office library books: where identified, these have been indicated. The books were prepared by the governments to accompany their records, and were usually published one or two years after the recordings had been made.