Kanauji of Kanpur: A brief overview

Hindi, in its totality, refers to a dialect continuum spoken mainly across northern India. This continuum is usually divided into two forms: Eastern and Western Hindi. Eastern Hindi is mainly made up of Awadhi, Chhattisgarhi and Bagheli dialects, while Western Hindi consists of Hindostani, Banagru, Braj Bhaka, Bundeli and Kanauji dialects. After Linguistic survey of India (1894-1928) by George A. Grierson – there has been little or no work which specifically focuses on Kanauji. Trivedi (1993, 2005) and Mishra and Bali (2010, 2011) report some secondary data from Kanauji in their works, their focus of inquiry is not Kanauji though. Lewis, Simons & Fennig (2013) refers Kanauji as a language with very low identity. This paper attempts to study the current sociolinguistic situation of Kanauji spoken in the Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh (India). Some other goals of the paper are following: 1) to feel the pulse of language attitude, with reference to standard Hindi, of the people in Kanpur 2) to present basic linguistic information and 3) to direct attention of the other linguists to Kanauji, which unfortunately has not been the case so far despite of it being mother tongue of millions. This study is result of eighteen days of a fieldtrip to Kanpur district and subsequent preparation of a small speech database of Kanauji. Importance of the work lies in the fact that no previous work, which specifically focuses on Kanauji, has been published so far. This is true at least in the open literature.