Nepali Interlanguage Research

Introduction

Nepali belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family and is closely related to Hindi. It began appearing (in an older form) in what is now Nepal around 300 C.E., when Hindu Indo-Aryans invaded the area from the south, displacing the Buddhist Kirantis. The now unified Nepal is made up of over one hundred ethnic groups, each with its own language and culture. Nepali is the national unifying language and is spoken by most Nepalis as a first or second language (O'Rourke and Shrestha 2008, 9). In addition, Nepali is spoken in other areas of the Himalayan region, including the southern part of Bhutan where it is the language of a substantial and oppressed minority called the Lhotshampa (Riccardi 2003, 539). It is this linguistically-defined minority group, which consists mostly of Hindus and Christians, that inspired my interest in the Nepali language (Chhetri 2004). Since the early 1990's, the government of Bhutan, which is officially a Buddhist kingdom, has instigated a campaign of forced eviction of Lhotshampa residents in southern Bhutan, claiming that they are illegal aliens (Minority Rights Group 2008). Because of this, a large number of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees now live in camps in Nepal.

I came in contact with two of these refugees in my volunteer work with English language learners at Mann Middle School in Colorado Springs. Their families recently immigrated here from a refugee camp in Nepal. They had received only limited English schooling prior to moving to the United States but have, in the first few months they have been here, developed a limited but significant communicative competence. The girl, Khina, comes from a Hindu family, while the boy, Sita Ram, is Christia...

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...odifiers before the noun in a nominal phrase. For this reason, a Nepali learning English will have more difficulty with basic word order than with the order of constituents in a noun phrase (Regmi 2003, 106).

Unlike English, the subject of a Nepali sentence can be omitted when it is a pronoun, because the verb morphology and contextual clues provide information on the subject (Toba 1998, 66).

Adverbs precede the verb in a verb phrase.

Nepali often omits articles such as those found in English (eg. a, the). When clarification is needed, demonstratives are used (O'Rourke and Shrestha 2008, 17). For this reason, one would expect an interlanguage Nepali-English grammar to lack.

Nepali is similar to English, and quite distinct from the other languages of the Indian subcontinent in its preference for direct, rather than indirect discourse (Riccardi 2003, 549).