What Is Thanjavur Marathi?

Being a minority linguistic group in another linguistic state namely Tamil Nadu, the speakers are shifting rapidly to Tamil/ Kannada or English. Earlier, the language was being used as medium of instruction in few Marathi medium schools in Tamil Nadu. It was in use as language of rituals along with Sanskrit. Most importantly, it was language of literature. However, as observed by native speakers, the use of Thanjavur Marathi has now shrunk to become a community language spoken only at home by the descendents of the Thanjavur Marathi people. Younger generations are denying the use of language even at the household. There is possibility that the dialect may be extinct, because it is being used for very few daily activities. In the view of functional
There are strong evidences for comparing standard Marathi with Thanjavur Marathi which also arise interesting questions about contact linguistics. However, there is no linguistic description available for Thanjavur Marathi. Therefore, to begin with, describing Thanjavur Marathi is given priority. The descriptive and analytic resources of basic linguistic theory will be adopted to write TM grammar.
The expression "basic linguistic theory" (following R. M. W. Dixon) refers to the scientific way that is most commonly in use in language description, particularly grammatical descriptions of entire languages. As Dryer puts it “…this is by no means a newly born theoretical framework. On the contrary, it is the type of linguistic theory that is used regularly in writing grammars or in linguistic typology, except that it is rarely acknowledged as a theoretical framework. What may be new is the acknowledgement of it as a framework” (Dryer 2006a).
Basic Linguistic Theory is essentially descriptive framework. It attempts to give an explanation of what exists in a language and how all the different elements are related to each
These texts consist of legends, narratives of recent events, instructions for praying, performing rituals, cooking, travelling, and so on. These are recorded and transcribed for analysis. These texts are gathered from participant observation. In the cases where researchers investigate communities of which they are not members, their outsider status poses a challenge to their ability to overcome the observer’s paradox. In an attempt to change this status, investigators may adopt the role of participant observer. This ethnographic approach entails long term involvement in a community and is fundamentally a pursuit of local cultural knowledge (Johnstone 2000:82). The principal benefits of participant observation are (a) the amount and quality of data collected and (b) the familiarity with community practices gained by the investigator. There are occasions, however, in which elicitation data is needed for contrastive analysis or when targeting specific semantic or morpho-syntactic domains. In other cases, data from elicitation is clearer than data from texts as it contains only the target morpheme or construction, and not other phenomena that could potentially confuse the