1 A CASE STUDY OF ATTRITION OF SARAIKI IN DELHI Nasir A. Syed (nasirabbassla@gmail.com) Rajkumar Malik (rajkumarmalik@sifi.com) ABSTRACT: A large scale mass migration to and from Pakistan occurred as a result of division of the Subcontinent into two Independent dominions, Pakistan and India. Saraiki speakers who migrated from Pakistan became a linguistic minority on arrival in India. The current study analyzes the speech of 61 such migrants and 57 of their progeny who were born in Delhi after the migration. Half of the participants of both groups were female. The current study identifies the role of markedness, gender, attitude, incomplete acquisition and frequency of use in language attrition. The participants were asked to produce words carrying breathy voiced sonorants [m h n h l h ɲ h ɳ h ], plan alveo-palatal nasal [ɲ], fricatives [z x ɣ] and implosives [ɓ ʄ ɗ ɠ] of Saraiki. The recordings were evaluated by 3 native speakers of Saraiki of the area from where the participants' families had migrated. The findings show that those participants who were more affiliated to Hindi were losing their L1 (Saraiki) consonants faster than those who were less affiliated to it. Those migrants who were young at the time of migration, were faster in losing Saraiki phonemes than those who were adults at the time of migration. The role of phonetic factors was evident in that the participants were losing coronal implosives more rapidly than labial implosives. It is because labial implosives are perceptually more prominent than coronal ones. The participants were not losing retroflex nasal because it is not only used frequently in Saraiki but it also frequently occurs in Hindi. The participants were more accurate in producing coronal fricatives compared to producing velar fricatives. This shows the role of markedness in language loss. The female participants were found to be less accurate in Saraiki consonants than male participants. However, frequency of speaking the L1 (Saraiki) does not seem to have any correlation with language attrition/maintenance. Keywords: Attrition, Consonant, Hindi, Saraiki 1. Introduction The British East India Company managed to occupy the Subcontinent of India and Pakistan in 1857. For the next 90 years, the Subcontinent remained under the British control as its colony. In 1947, the Subcontinent got freedom and two independent states of Pakistan and India appeared on the map of the world. The Sub-continent was divided on the basis of religion. Therefore, at the time of the division, there was a large scale transfer of population to and from Pakistan. Lots of Saraiki speaking Hindu families moved from Pakistan to India in 1947. Thus, Saraiki originally a language of the central Pakistan emerged as a minority language in India. The Saraiki speaking migrants who settled in Delhi and their sons and daughters slowly started shifting from Saraiki to the dominant language Hindi. This paper studies the direction of language loss among the Saraiki speaking migrants settled in Delhi. It is relevant to point out that in this paper, the terms attrition, loss, convergence and obsolescence will be used synonymously although experts have pointed out subtle differences between these terms. Since the study was conducted with a view to understand the nature of convergence of Saraiki into Hindi, this paper focuses on only those Saraiki sounds that do not exist in Hindi.