I am Peggy Mohan here for an AMA on r/Dravidology. I am a linguist and author of “Father Tongue, Motherland’ and ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants’.

Posted by u/FlamingoObjective629 in r/Dravidiology · 2025-06-07 · Score 85 · 65 comments

Original thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dravidiology/comments/1l5nhxq/i_am_peggy_mohan_here_for_an_ama_on_rdravidology/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dravidiology/comments/1kxp4rn/announcement_ama_on_sunday_08_june_2025_with_the/

Dear r/Dravidiology community,

I am Peggy Mohan, a linguist and the author of ‘Father Tongue, Motherland’ and ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants’. See: https://www.penguin.co.in/book/father-tongue-motherland/ and https://www.penguin.co.in/book/wanderers-kings-merchants/

I was born in Trinidad. My father was a Trinidadian whose family was of Indian origin, and my mother was from Newfoundland, Canada. I studied linguistics at the University of the West Indies, and did my PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I have taught linguistics at various universities, and have served as an expert witness analyzing confessions at POTA (terrorism) trials. I also produced a television series in Hindi for children and have taught music.

I am excited to interact with you on this Subreddit. Please send me your questions, and I will try to answer them all.

See https://scroll.in/article/1079257/linguist-peggy-mohan-examines-early-indus-valley-languages-and-their-lack-of-literature for an excerpt from my latest book, ‘Father Tongue, Motherland’. The excerpt contains some of the introduction of the chapter titled ‘In Search of Language X’, which is an attempt to reconstruct a hypothetical language of the Indus Valley Civilization. As I say there, ‘The favoured approach to finding the Indus Valley language has been by linguists: philologists who bypassed the tempting Indus Valley seals…’ So let us try to stay away from the seals during this AMA session, as I don’t think they are anywhere close to being decoded, and my interest is in the structure and sounds of the language(s), not these symbols.

For more overview of my work, please see the following discussions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIx4UxknMSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwN1bTh5O8E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5AokqnTMg8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcZZDk6NQSc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TClQ2iJ2aLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY03LvR080M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YNtNLAHKWU

Ask Me Anything!

Comments

u/extendtoapoint · 2025-06-07 · 28 points

Hi Peggy, thank you for doing this AMA. On the Argumentative Indians podcast, you mentioned that if we stripped away the Prakrit vocabulary from Punjabi, we might be left with something resembling a South Indian language. Could you elaborate on what you meant? Even if we set vocabulary aside, which is largely of Indo-Aryan origin, the grammar of Punjabi doesn’t seem to resemble Dravidian languages at all, and its phonetic system doesn’t seem to be particularly Dravidian either, resembling other languages in the South Asian linguistic area. Could you clarify what features you had in mind?

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 26 points

That depends on what you are looking for. There are a number of features in Punjabi that don’t conform to Sanskrit or the prakrits, but point to an older ‘operating system’: for example, the absences of cases (kārakas) in favor of postpositions. Or gender agreement in verbs (Dravidian languages only express gender in verb agreement, never noun-adjective). Yes: part of the vocabulary transfer from local prakrits brought in Indo-Aryan grammatical gender (the earlier gender in the IVC was most likely a ‘natural gender’, tables and chairs neuter), and an Indo-Aryan gender agreement between nouns and adjectives. In terms of sounds, Punjabi, like all the other Indus Valley periphery languages, has no voiced aspirates (gh jh ḍh dh bh). It avoids them, using instead tones: ‘kàr’ for ‘ghar’. It also has more retroflexes than languages like Hindi to the east, more geminate pairs of repeated stops: ṭ ḍ ṇ ḷ (khāṇā, saḍḍe-nāḷ, kabbo-sajjo). This avoidance of voiced aspirates throughout the IVC periphery is significant.

In a way, the resemblances to Dravidian are at the ‘skeletal’ level. There are also a number of features where modern Dravidian languages of South India differ from the modern IVC periphery languages. Punjabi has ergativity (the -ne thing that links the verb to the object, in the past tense). This was lost in the journey south, just as it was lost from Dakkhini in Urdu’s journey south. We need to imagine that Dravidian languages too adapted to local contact languages in their journey south.

u/genshinprabhaavam · 2025-06-07 · 17 points

Hi there, thanks for your insightful books on languages. I had a question about something that stood out in Chapter 3 of Wanderers, Kings, and Merchants.

You mention a religious conflict in Kerala between Buddhism and Hinduism that supposedly led to the Sanskritisation of Malayalam and the degradation of Buddhists and Jains into lower castes after 8th Century. Further, you reference K. Sugathan’s Buddhamathavam Jaathi Vyavasthayam and it’s commentary to claim that “people who didn’t follow any religion later emerged as Ezhavas and Thiyyas.”

Isn’t this interpretation a bit of a stretch?

We have first-hand colonial period ethnographic accounts (like those of Thurston, Logan and Samuel Mateer) clearly showing that communities like the Ezhavas and Thiyyas followed regional syncretic traditions that combined local deities, ancestor worship, and Puranic Hinduism. There’s little in those sources to support the idea that they originated from “people without religion” or Buddhist lineages.

Also, the source you cite—Buddhamathavam Jaathi Vyavasthayam—is more of a social critique than academic historiography. Why choose a non-peer-reviewed, polemical work to make such a strong historical claim?

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 15 points

True. I was groping for an explanation as to why Kerala also experienced a big linguistic shift in the 12th century almost in line with what was happening in the north. In the case of the north ‘something happened’ in the sense of a change of regime, the sultanates appearing. That was what made me suspect something political or religious. I still think ‘something happened’. But maybe the end of Buddhism wasn’t it, or was only a part of it…

u/NAHTHEHNRFS850 · 2025-06-07 · 14 points

Hello Dr. Mohan. Thank you for being willing to engage with us in this forum.

My questions are as follows:

  1. How can lay-people better organize to support research in the field of linguistics?
  2. What type of linguistic medium (e.g. oral transmissions, literary transmissions etc.) and subject material (e.g. cosmology, poetry, history etc.) best preserves languages and their unique linguistics features; and why do you think that is?
  3. Has there been any detectable traces of Bururakshi-related substratum in any languages in South Asia beyond Northern Pakistan?
  4. Has there been any detectable traces of Nihali-related substratum in any languages in South Asia beyond West-Central Indian?
  5. Has there been any detectable traces of Veddha-related substratum in any languages in South Asia beyond Sri Lanka?
  6. Has there been any detectable traces of an Mundic-related or Malayic-related substratum in: Dravidian languages in Southern India & Sri Lanka; Sinhala language in Sri Lanka; or Veddha language in Sri Lanka?
  7. Based on the most recent scholarship, would Brahui be better classified as a relict language population or a more recent arrival to the Makran desert area?
  8. Is Nuristani an older arrival or younger arrival to South Asian than Indo-Aryan? Why do you think Indo-Aryan became the dominant Indo-European language branch in South Asian rather than Nuristani?

Additional Professional Questions (please don’t feel compelled to answer if you do not want to):

  1. Have you noticed any differences between the Academic cultures of the: Caribbean, American & Indian? If so what are they? What could each culture learn from one another?
  2. For people interested in pursuing Linguistics as a field of study, what career advise would you recommend to them for employment in: academia and industry? Furthermore, what adjacent fields of study best synergize with linguistics (e.g. history,anthropology,computer science etc.)?

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 13 points

Wow!

  1. Language is best preserved by being allowed to engage in modern pursuits. Science and technology. Not being left in a box and kept under the bed and brought out once in a while.

  2. The other way round, I think. If the Burusho were anything like the other migrants into South Asia, they would have been almost only men. And like the others they would have married local women. That makes Burushaski an especially rich source of information on ‘features’ of the IVC languages, which would still have been alive at the time they arrived. Retroflexion (though it is identical to Pashto in this, and lacks ṇ and ḷ but has ṣ ṭṣ ḍẓ). It has what seems to me to be to be source ergativity: in all tenses, with agreement with both ‘agent’ and object.

  3. Veddha is one promising thing I need to explore. It just might be the only tribal language of the south that still has pre-Dravidian features. All the other tribal languages of south India are unequivocally Dravidian. (Which raises a few questions: were they already close in structure? Did the IVC languages accomodate to this First Indian pattern?).

  4. No. Unless by ‘Mundic’ you include First Indian (as in before the Austro-Asiatic male migration 4,000 years ago). Similarity with First Indian is something I would expect, and thank you for putting this suspicion of mine into words! But some of these features (marking both subjects and objects on verbs) don’t travel far south, fading out even within the Munda family.

  5. I can tell you my suspicions. No. Dravidian languages of central India have been known to migrate, and may have existed closer to the northwest 1,000 years ago. There is even a similar Dravidian language in Nepal. But my concern about Brahui is linked more to the total absence of ergativity and even natural gender, and the fact that all its loan vocabulary seems to link to Persian, modern Urdu, but seems to have missed the era of the prakrits. In that respect, the other modern Pakistani languages look more IVC Dravidian. But, of course, it would take solid historical information to decide this either way. Brahui being Dravidian is not in doubt. What is, is whether it is a relict IVC language.

  6. The Caribbean pays attention to creolization as a means of mixing language families. The rest of ‘legacy linguistics’ has stayed away from creoles, and as a result what we call historical linguistics, and deciding descent by vocabulary (the paternal line!) seems sadly out of date in a two-parent world.

  7. Translation? Using shared substrata to make the translation process more machine-friendly? It would also preserve our multilingualism.

u/Awkward_Finger_1703 · 2025-06-08 · 9 points

Hi Peggy! What your understanding of Eelam Tamils or Sri Lankan Tamil language? You have highlighted in your book that grammar stays even language shifts! What I observed in Jaffna Tamil we don’t use Subject Verb Object but as Object Verb Subject ! பழம் சாப்பிட்டநான்? Instead of usual standard Tamil நான் பழம் சாப்பிட்டேன் ! Does it mean an X language existed in Sri Lanka before the arrival of Tamil & Sinhalese to Sri Lanka?

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 9 points

I don’t know. But it is something to explore. It certainly suggests two different entities. If (as I imagine) Language X encountered and interbred with local women, this could point to differences in the local substrata. Or it could have been later, and after the two got separated. But it points to an interesting line of enquiry. I am thinking Sri Lanka would tell us a lot about the early journey south.

u/PacificRingOfFire · 2025-06-08 · 8 points

Many language isolates like Nihali Kusunda are endangered and nearing extinction. As a linguist, does that concern you? What do you suggest Government or common people do to preserve them. Or do you see it as a natural cycle of extinction

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 8 points

Not ‘natural’, but brought on by social and political choices similar to ‘globalization’. As communicating groups expand in size (think: you and me in the same group) there is bound to be extinction as a by-product. The problem is the scale at which it is happening, and the way we are pushing English even onto small children who would understand concepts better if we forgot ‘the nation’ till at least middle school and just spoke to them, and gave them books, in languages they could understand. Languages are tied to their ecosystems, and if we move on from those, all the best intentions will not keep the languages alive.

50 years ago I was concerned about every small endangered language, and was working on my own dialect, facing extinction in the Caribbean. Now, I find myself trying to shore up Hindi (our one-time aggressor) against English.

u/RageshAntony · 2025-06-08 · 7 points

Hi Peggy Mohan,

  1. I know that we don’t know what language was spoken in the Harappan civilization. But if it was not Dravidian—let’s say it was language HL—then is there any substratum of that language present in current Indian languages?
  2. Was ancient Dravidian society matrilineal or patrilineal?

3.Can the continuous mixing of English with Indian languages eventually lead to a creole or pidgin?( Even basic verbs are becoming English)

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 9 points

  1. The IVC Dravidian substratum is still visible in all the modern South Asian languages as far east as the Ganga-Yamuna confluence and south as far as Marathi and Konkani (though a major feature, ergativity, fades out in southern Maharashtra). And let’s call it ‘proto-Dravidian’, as this feature, ergativity, is absent from the modern south Indian languages.
  2. There is some sense in the Rig Veda that it may have been matrilineal (the use of matronymics in place of patronymics in the case, for example, of Vr̥tra, who was a Dānava, as his mother was Danu). But there might have been more going on.
  3. Well. We do see the emergence of Hinglish, where (I’m sure) the mixing is rule-governed and not random. Verbs do seem to cross the cell membrane less easily than nouns, though in the end they do cross. In creole languages every single noun, verb, word, or affix is replaced. Which is why they (used to) call North Indian languages ‘Indo-Aryan’. The truth is more complex. Pidgins… I don’t see any pidgins in India (I stress this in ‘Father Tongue, Motherland’, saying the process went Sanskrit > prakrits > creoles. Even creolists in the Caribbean are knocking pidgins out from the story. Pidgins are temporary male stop-gap trade languages).

u/geopoliticsdude · 2025-06-08 · 6 points

Good morning from the Great Lakes region!

I just had one question. What is your opinion on the Zagrosian language family theory?

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 11 points

We know nothing. But if my model of mixture holds, I would expect the Zagrosians contributed vocabulary, while the local First Indian languages provided the structure. Which is essentially what we see: First Indian IVC features continuing through the northern Munda belt, the Andamans and Australian Aboriginal languages. Double marking, ergativity, retroflexion.

If the Zagrosians were essentially men, who came later (9,000 years ago is ‘later’) one could have expected them to have provided distinctively Dravidian vocabulary. But we have no sources to compare known Dravidian vocabulary (and suspected IVC Dravidian vocabulary and totally vanished Zagrosian vocabulary). One is left relying on the model as a compas.

u/Stalin2023 · 2025-06-08 · 6 points

Greetings from Pondicherry, India!

In one of your interviews, you mentioned that unlike other languages where there were borrowings from Prakrit, Malayalam was unique because it borrowed words directly from Sanskrit rather than any Prakrit. What are the reasons for this exception? Any theories regarding this?

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 10 points

Because in Malayalam some Sanskrit vocabulary came in via Maṇipravāḷam, the literary route, from writers who were otherwise writing in Sanskrit. In the north, vocabulary (in fact, ALL vocabulary), came as ‘tadbhavas’, from local prakrits, not as ‘tatsamas’.

u/Warrior_under_sun · 2025-06-08 · 5 points

Hi Dr. Mohan, I really enjoyed your recent book Father Tongue, Motherland, and had a couple of follow-up questions.

  1. You described the turnover from Prakrits to new Indo-Aryan languages that occured around 1000-1200 CE. The swiftness of the turnover is noticeable, even in parts of India that did not come immediately under Islamic rule. My question is, do you believe that by this time, Prakrits were a learned, second-language of Kshatriyas, and that everyone, even Kshatriyas and Brahmins were speaking the new IA languages natively? Even today, these groups speak new IA languages natively rather than Prakrits.
  2. A subquestion is when do you think the switchover for the majority of the population in northern India occured, from their native Dravidian or Munda languages, to the new IA languages?
  3. I found the two-step process of language change you described in your book fascinating. My question is, do you think this model is specific to India and a function of India’s particular sociopolitical dynamics, or do you think it has salience elsewhere, like in Europe with the spread of Latin during the Roman Empire. In some other places, languages seem to spread to new populations without the radical grammatical reworking you see between Prakrits and new IA languages, and then process to evolve through predictable patterns (Latin to Italian). In other places, like in Anatolia, languages seem to spread to new populations without any major reworking at all (i.e. the replacement of Greek with Turkish in Anatolia). In some places, with the Arabic dialects, we may see something more like the two-step process. So my question is, in what circumstances do we see this two-step linguistic process that you describe in your book? Is it universal, particular to India, particular to certain social dynamics, and/or a function of an unformed and unstabilized language frontier?

Thank you, in advance, for your responses.

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 6 points

  1. If we go by the written record, we are directed towards 1000-1200 CE. I am sure the process started earlier, very locally (one gets glimpses of a similar vocabulary shift in the tribal languages of Jharkhand adopting Bengali and Bhojpuri words, slowly). I am guessing that at this time the last traces of the old IVC languages would still have been there (as late as this!). And that Brahmins and Kshatriyas would have known the new languages, just as they would have been totally familiar with old IVC languages, even if some chose not to speak them). But the prakrits were the literary languages that defined the Kshatriyas.
  2. So… I would have to guess. We like to think these things happen fast, but maybe it was very gradual. if there was no pressure to change, why would it have been fast? And it would have been uneven. The ones moving to towns, and interfacing with new activities, legal systems, trade activities, would have had more access to prakrit vocabulary, and begun including it faster. (Think: Hinglish). Then, as the sultanates came, there would have been change, and support for the new languages. But… just how long the very last traces of old IVC languages lasted is a question that lingers.
  3. Exactly. By calling it ‘creole’ and linking it to the Caribbean and slavery linguists have missed a much more common mode of mixture. And yes: Europe is a great example of this: the differences between Latin and French/Spanish/Portuguese/Italian/Romanian… all point to (male) Roman legionnaires and travellers setting up families with local women. I don’t known enough about Anatolia, but the story of the spread of Arabic suggests something similar. Swahili? Though mixed only in its vocabulary, and maybe less in its grammar… So universal. Yes.

u/Good-Attention-7129 · 2025-06-08 · 5 points

Greetings.

In the link you kindly provided to your excerpt, you mention the IVC cities potentially having diplomats, as well as “unrelated languages watching from the side lines”.

Would this include people from places such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, and if so what effect, if any, could there be on IVC languages?

Thank you.

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 7 points

Maybe! I was at the time thinking of totally local minority groups that had declined to join the melting pot. It is a guess that *all* the IVC languages constituted ‘one family’. That is an attempt to get away from the notion of just one language in such a large region. I am also thinking about people like the Paṇi (Phoenicians?) who traded from the Mediterranean to the Indus Valley region. And further south, and east? First Indians?

It takes a certain political clout for an incoming group to affect a language. If anything it tends to be in vocabulary. Almost only nouns. For more than that, a new hybrid emerging, it takes a long term presence (as happened with Sanskrit/prakrits). And words are the one thing from the IVC languages that got totally lost.

u/depaknero · 2025-06-08 · 4 points

Hi ma’am, not trying to create a controversy but, if willing, could you answer the following questions?

  1. Which out of Old Tamizh and Vedic Sanskrit is older according to the accepted scientific evidences?
  2. What are the approximate time periods of origin of Old Tamizh, Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit according to the accepted scientific evidences?
  3. Is Proto Dravidian just Proto Tamizh (the ancestor of Old Tamizh) or is it a separate language which is the ancestor of all Dravidian languages?
  4. What is the approximate time period of origin of Proto Dravidian according to the accepted scientific evidences?
  5. Is Old Malayalam a descendent of Old Tamizh or Middle Tamizh?
  6. What is the approximate time period of origin of Old Malayalam according to the accepted scientific evidences?
  7. Till when approximately were Tamizh (Old and/or Middle) and Malayalam (Old and/or Middle) nearly the same in terms of grammar and vocabulary?

Thanks!

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 8 points

Oh no!

  1. Well, Vedic Sanskrit is about 3,700 years old. Dravidian languages are older, but that does not mean specifically Tamizh. At what point in Dravidian history do we start speaking separately about Tamizh? I don’t know…
  2. Classical Sanskrit comes up… around 2,500 years ago, the age of Paṇini, Kalidāsa… literary Sanskrit. I don’t know about Tamizh: you need to ask a specialist on Tamizh literature. But Tamizh is more than just its literature, and once you open up the discussion to local variants the topic gets complicated.
  3. Proto Dravidian is a hypothetical language, as we have no solid data on the languages of the IVC. I speak of Proto Dravidian to refer to a language family that had a number of features, one of which is absent from modern South Indian languages, ergativity. Tamizh refers to a language based in South India now. That said, the two might have been similar, but we really don’t know.
  4. There is no scientific evidence to cite: according to geneticists the Zagros presence in the IVC started 9,000 years ago, so that should have been the start of Proto Dravidian languages. But they are extinct, so it is all hypothetical.
  5. I don’t want to speculate here, except to say that in early times you only had local dialects, and over time these aligned into different ‘languages’, for political or commercial reasons, losing some of the original variety. And in the process the perception of homogeneity emerged. But, in truth, neither Tamizh nor Malayalam is, even today, a single homogeneous language.

6 and 7. I think you should ask someone who specializes on that period of history.

u/iashris · 2025-06-08 · 4 points

Hello Peggy Ma’am, I’m a big fan of your work - your books have inspired many of my videos on YouTube, and I often recommend them to budding language enthusiasts.

  1. I’ve been researching the Kashmiri language and came across an argument by linguist S.K. Toshkhani. He notes that words like rost and sost in Kashmiri correspond to rahit and sahit in Sanskrit, suggesting that the Kashmiri forms might preserve a pre-Vedic stratum - since the sa > ha shift in Sanskrit is considered a later development. Do you think there’s merit to this theory? Or do you feel the presence of rost/sost might be due to other factors?
  2. Some scholars have pointed out structural and phonological parallels between Burushaski and Nihali, and there’s even been speculative talk of a possible macrofamily. Do you see any merit in the idea that these could share a common substrate, even if deep-time?

2b. In Kashmiri mythology, Rishi Kashyapa protects the nagas (the land’s original inhabitants) from the Pisachas before settling Aryan people in the valley. Grieson interprets this as the nagas being speakers of an older language, the Pisachas as Iranians, and the settlers as Indo-Aryans. Could the nagas have been speakers of something like a Burushaski–Nihali type of substrate? Do you see any symbolic reality in this mythological stratification?

  1. In your work, you’ve suggested that retroflexion in Sanskrit might have emerged from pronunciation slippage during oral transmission from retroflex-rich mother tongues, possibly Dravidian. That intuitively makes sense, especially in a multilingual environment.

But while reading the Rigveda, I noticed it already contains a remarkable density of retroflex sounds. Would all these retroflexes have been later day additions or do you think there is a possibility of an independent innovation of retroflexes in Vedic?

Thank you so much for all the work you do and making so many people get interested in languages.

u/FlamingoObjective629 (OP) · 2025-06-08 · 10 points

  1. Nihali! I must look into this. Burushaski has been ‘isolated’ in more than one sense, so may preserve an older age, when the IVC languages were still spoken, in some of its features.
  2. Kashmiri is something I have saved up to look at later. Yes, there are lots of things like this, like ‘gats’hān’ (> gacchati) and also differences in things like word order. Let’s see if it turns out to be a different story!
  3. Be careful: the Rig Veda we have today emerged 700 years after the first hymns were composed, by which time a lot of retroflexion had crept into *recitation* (though spoken Sanskrit would have picked up retroflexion within a generation). So when we speak of a pre-retroflexion stage of Sanskrit, we (or rather, my Sanskrit professor, Madhav Deshpande) are speculating back to 700 years before the samhitas.

u/Illustrious_Lock_265 · 2025-06-08 · 5 points

Hello Peggy,

How did the Proto-Tamil speakers settle? How come the pre-Tamil descendants settled in the present day TN region after moving there through the Palakkad Gap while the speakers of the later West Coast dialect of Proto-Tamil remained in the Kerala region? Does this mean that there was once a pre-Tamil language in the West Coast before it became influenced by Proto-Tamil? Could this be the reason for Malayalam retaining certain archaic features that Tamil lost? Or did some of the Proto-Tamil speakers later move back to the West Coast?

Thanks