Niladri Sekhar Dash The Morphodynamics of the Formation of Personal Pronominal Forms in the Mohanpurī Dialect Spoken along the Bengal-Odisha Border Abstract: In this paper, I provide a short study of the unique patterns found in the formation of personal pronouns in the Mohanpurī dialect, which is used along the line of the Bengal-Odisha border in the district of Paśchim Medinīpur, West Bengal, India. The study is based on an analysis of a large collection of language data and other information which I have elicited from thirty native speakers, whose ancestors have inhabited this geographical area for generations (Dash 2019). In my work, I have followed the standard methods of language data col- lection and applied the standard techniques of corpus linguistics in the analysis of the data. I have also used extralinguistic information that I have retrieved direct- ly from my informants through interactive elicitation. The main purposes of this paper are to reflect on the personal pronominal system of the dialect and to pre- sent some new findings that are relevant for understanding the Mohanpurī dialect in relation to Bengali and Odia, two neighbouring languages which have put tremendous pressure on this dialect. I have identified some pronominal forms which are used neither in Bengali nor in Odia. These pronominal forms have retained some unique case markers and specifiers which are perhaps derived from old Odia – a property that arguably indicates ancestral affinity of the dialect with Odia. For this study, I have only focused on personal pronominal forms. Other pronominal forms are discussed in a separate paper, to provide a complete picture of the pronominal system of the dialect. What is most notable about this study is that it confirms the existence of a pronominal system that has succeeded in preserving some antique forms which are missing in modern Bengali and mod- ern Odia. The present study also confirms a linkage between Bengali and Odia through Mohanpurī, which shares many linguistic properties and features com- mon to Bengali and Odia. Keywords: Personal pronouns, Bengali, Odia, Mohanpurī, Medinīpur, Odisha, language documentation, South-Western Bengali 1 Introduction The pronominal system is one of the universal linguistic properties of all natural languages (Greenberg 1963: 71–95). Every natural language has pronouns – ei- ther well-structured or at least in manageable form – that serve a range of lin-