Byari dialect

Features

The dialect generally uses the Malayalam and Kannada alphabets for writing. In 2007, the state government established the Karnataka Beary Sahitya Academy for the preservation and promotion of the Beary literature and culture. Being a distant cousin of other dialects of Malayalam and surrounded by other linguistic groups for centuries, mainly Tulu, the dialect exhibits ancient features as well as modern innovations not seen in other well-known dialects of Malayalam. Surrounded by Tulu-speaking populations, the impact of Tulu on the phonological, morphological and syntactic structure of the dialect is evident.

Distinction of ḻ, ṇ, ṟ

Sounds peculiar to Standard Malayalam such as 'ḻ', 'ṇ', 'ṟ' are not found in this dialect. 'ḷ' and 'ṇ' are merged with l and n, respectively. 'ṟ' is merged with r and tt, 'tt' to t. This resembles Tulu.

v > b

The initial v of standard Malayalam corresponds to an initial b in Byari. The same change has taken place in Tulu, too.

1. Some dialects.
2. This orthographic representation is phonemic. On a phonetic level, it often becomes , which is closer to the Tulu and Byari forms. This occurs because of a rule whereby voiced plosive consonants are intervocalic allophones of their unvoiced counterparts. However, this only applies to native Dravidian words, and as vāṭaka is a Sanskrit loanword, the prescriptively correct pronunciation is indeed .

Distinction of 'a' and 'e'

The final 'a' of standard Malayalam corresponds to the final 'e' in Byari.

Distinction of 'n' and 'm'

The word final 'n' and 'm' of standard Malayalam are dropped in Byari.

Degeminated consonants

Geminated consonants occurring after a long vowel and also after a second short vowel of a word in standard Malayalam get degeminated in Byari.

Lexical relations

Almost all lexical items in Byari dialect can be related to corresponding lexical items in other Malayalam varieties, Tulu or Perso-Arabic origin. However, some equivalents can only be found in Mappila dialects of Malayalam in Kerala.

Person endings

Verbs in old Dravidian languages did not have any person marking. Person endings of verbs observed in modern Dravidian languages are later innovations. Malayalam is the only Dravidian language that does not show any verbal person suffixes, so Malayalam verbs can be said to represent the original stage of Dravidian verbs (though Old Malayalam did have verbal person suffixes at some point). Person suffixes in Byari closely resemble those of Tulu, although the past tense in this dialect agrees with that of standard Malayalam in shape as well as in the distribution of allomorphs.

Arabic influence

Byari has a strong lexical influence of the Arabic language. Nativised Arabic words are very common in everyday speech, especially in coastal areas. Byari also has words related to Tamil. Tamil and Standard Malayalam Speakers can understand Byari dialect upto a great extent.

Byari dialect films

The first Byari-dialect feature film Byari shared the award for the best feature film at the 59th Indian National Film Awards.