International Journal of Language & Linguistics

First Results of a Linguistic Fieldwork on Baṅgāṇī
Andrea Drocco

Introduction
Baṅgāṇī is an Indo-Aryan language of the group of Western Pahāṛī languages spoken in the so-called Baṅgāṇ area located in the Uttarkāśī district of Uttarākhaṇḍ, in particular in the area between the Pabar and Tons rivers. Esteemed as a critically endangered language by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, in the last few decades Baṅgāṇī has been a topic of controversy as regards mainly the question of whether this language contains Indo-European but non-Indo-Aryan vocabulary or not (for a summary see Zoller 1999, but also the personal website of Peter Edwin Hook at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/bangani.html). Even if the majority of scholars related to this controversy concluded their studies claiming that much work on documentation but especially on the linguistic description/analysis of Baṅgāṇī has to be done, not so many of such works, if not at all, appeared till now (two exceptions are Van Driem & Sharmā 1997 and Zoller 2007).

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