Aspects of Hindi Phonology

by Manjari Ohala

The language whose phonology is described in this work is standard Hindi, i.e., the Hindi used in everyday casual speech by educated native speakers in cities such as Varanasi, Lucknow, Delhi etc., which is different from highly Sanskritized Hindi called literary style Hindi and highly Preso-Arabicized Urdu, a native speaker being one who has learnt the language as his first language. The author`s interest lies in accounting for the Hindi speakers` competence i.e., providing evidence for the psychological reality of certain sound patterns of Hindi. This study is a mixture of two types of evidence. Some evidence is provided from experimental data and other is from hypercorrection, from children`s mistakes, from native speakers` reactions to certain forms. the model used is that of generative phonology with modifications suggested throughout. MANJAIR OHALA is an assistant professor in the Linguistics Program at San Jose State University. She has published several articles on Hindi phonology and phonetics in Journals such as Language, Lingua, and Indian Linguistics.