The Indian subcontinent

The Indian subcontinent comprises Bangladesh, India1 and Pakistan, and its languages come from five major language families: Indo-Aryan, Nuristani branches of Indo-Iranian, Dravidian, branches of Austroasiatic and numerous Tibeto-Burman languages, as well as language isolates (Grierson 1903-1922, Masica 1991, Krishnamurti 2003, Thurgood and LaPolla 2003, Abbi 2013, Dryer and Haspelmath 2013). In general, the term prosody subsumes quantity contrasts, metrical structure, lexical tone, phrasing and intonation, but as far as is known at present, the only language of the Indian subcontinent to have lexical tone is Punjabi. In this chapter, we touch on all of these aspects of prosody, but discuss quantity only insofar as it is linked to stress, phrasing and intonation. It is not possible to cover the entire range of existing languages; rather, we will give representative examples, largely from Assamese, Bengali (Kolkata), Bangladeshi Bengali (Dacca), Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.