The Dhivehi Language: A Descriptive and Historical Grammar of Dhivehi and Its Dialects. 2 vols.

• Author: Gair, James W.

The Dhivehi Language: A Descriptive and Historical Grammar of Dhivehi and Its Dialects. 2 vols. By SONIA FRITZ. Beitrage zur Sudasien-Institute Universitat Heidelberg, vol. 191. Wurzburg: ERGON VERLAG, 2002. Pp. xvi + 270, vi + 280. [euro]75.

Dhivehi (Maldivian) (1) is the language of the Maldive Republic. It is also spoken on the island of Minocoy as Mahl. Dhivehi is an Indo-Aryan language, and its closest relative is Sinhala of Sri Lanka, so that they form the southernmost branch of the family, to which Fritz gives the name "Insular Indo-Aryan." This is a reasonable and useful designation worth adopting, perhaps expanded to "Southern Insular Indo-Aryan" to indicate the geographical location more fully and emphasize the separation from the northern IA languages.

Until quite recently there was relatively little linguistic information available on Dhivehi, and Fritz provides a brief summary, stating (p. 8)

The small amount of linguistic studies (in a wider sense) that has been devoted to Dhivehi so far shows that there has been but little interest in this language. In most cases, Dhivehi is not even mentioned in general Indological literature. ... The amount of special literature having Dhivehi as its subject is very restricted as well. Only a few publications exist, some of them having a very popular character; their only value consists in the material they comprise. In most cases, studies of a more scientific character are not really informative either, and there are practically no works of reference. Recently, however, there has been a rapid increase in the available sources, such as Bruce D. Cain, "Dhivehi (Maldivian): A Synchronic and Diachronic Study" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2000): Bruce D. Cain and James W. Gair, Dhivehi (Maldivian) (Languages of the World/Materials, vol. 63. Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000); and the long-awaited appearance of Christopher Reynolds's A Maldivian Dictionary (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), in addition to an online dictionary and work done by Maldivian scholars. Fritz's information-packed two-volume work is the fullest account so far and makes a significant contribution to the available information on the language. It is, as its subtitle indicates, both a descriptive and historical grammar, and the organization is essentially a familiar philological one. There is a general introduction of fifteen pages presenting the geographic and social situation and a historical account touching on the relationship with Sinhala. (2) The author notes that her primary goal is "a detailed comparative description of the morphology of the main dialects of Dhivehi," and the largest part of the volume is a two hundred-page section devoted to that, preceded by a thirty-three-page section on phonology. Only twelve pages are devoted to a "Syntactical Sketch," although it is also possible to garner a significant amount of syntactic information from the examples in the morphological descriptions. The second volume is devoted to data and indices and provides a great service to other scholars, by making possible direct access for analysis, as well as for checking some of the statements in the first volume.

Among the several virtues of the work is its provision of a large amount of detailed information on southern dialects that have been dealt with little if at all in preceding accounts, which have been based almost exclusively on the standard dialect of the capital Male. In addition to its intrinsic value, this will be of special interest to those attempting to define more fully...