An Exploratory Study Of Case Features Of Thali: An Indigenous Pakistani Language

Abstract

The paper aims to identify, generate and regenerate the case system in Thali, an undescribed, undocumented and unexplored variety of Punjabi. Thali is spoken in the vast expanse of Thal located between Jhelum and Sindh rivers from north to south 190 miles, and a maximum breadth of 70 miles district Layyaof Punjab, Pakistan by 1,120,951people. This study compares and contrasts Thali case system with that of English case system. The data were collected from four native speakers of the Thali language. The structure formulated by Andrew Carnegie was used to ascertain evidence to evaluate prevailing case marking models. It was analyzed that the grammar of the Thali language is mainly concerned with the word order, verb as head case marking, and other morphological and syntactic constructions. The established and flexible word order in Thali is SOV with postpositions where nouns get their position by postpositions. On the contrary, English has preposition with SVO word order. Morphological marking is also very common in all types of cases in Thali. On the contrary, case system in English is not only morphologically marked. In academia, to conceptualize these different linguistic structures becomea challenging job for Thali learners. Finally, this paper finds out some pedagogical strategies in the domain of EFL for Thali learners to teach and learn English case system as a foreign language.