Suffixation in the Inflectional Morphemes of Shina Language

Abstract

This paper deals with the suffixation of inflectional morphemes of Shina in nominal and verbal paradigms. Shina is a Dardic branch of Indo-Iranian languages spoken by members of a small ethnic group named Dards in the mountainous ranges of Karakoram, Himalaya, and Hindukush. This language is spoken in several dialects in Gilgit, Astore, Punyal, Baltistan, Chilas to Palas in Indus Kohistan within the Pakistani territories and in some parts of the Kashmir valley in India. Data for this work has been collected from discussions, conversations, and interviews of the native speakers of Shina as well as the previous work on Shina (Radloff, 1998; 1999; Schmidt, 2008). My personal field visits to Gilgit, Diamer and Astore valleys helped me to access the primary data both via discussions / conversations and interviews from native speakers The linguistic theory used in the present research on Shina is an Item-and-Process approach. Shina is an oral language and now the attempts are being made to develop its orthography. Shina has a strongly suffixing inflectional morphology, so its affixes are exclusively suffixal. Moreover, the accent is strongly marked in Shina, and it determines the declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs.