'Endangered Speeches of Idukki in Kerala' is a project report on Sociolinguistic survey of the Tribal dialects in the Idukki district carried out during the period 1977-78. Prof. (Dr.) V.R. Prabodhachandran Nayar, Department of Linguistics, University of Kerala was the Principal Investigator. Shri. K. Velappan, Junior Research Fellow assisted him in the collection of data. The tribal dialects analysed in this book are now under the verge of endangerment. The number of speakers is found to decline steadily. Data for this book were collected from 16 tribal settlements scattered in various parts of Idukki District. Malai Arayan, Malai Ulladas, Uralis, Mannans, Muthuvas, Paliyas, Kurumbappulayas and Karavazhippulayas are the tribes from whom data were collected for the present study.
This book comprises three parts viz., Part I Life and Culture, Part II Kinship terms, Part III Grammatical outlines. Introduction is an exhaustive one covering different aspects of Tribal life like tribal situations in Kerala and tribal languages of India, Tribal family organisation, social organisation etc.
The life cycle, rituals, religion and societal make up detailed in this book will compel researchers to investigate further.
One thing worthy to note here is that this book contains first hand knowledge of the Tribes settled in Idukki District. Direct informations gathered through intensive field work are analysed here.
Taking in to account the endangerment phenomenon, among Tribal languages this report is publishing for comparative studies based on the census data available from successive population rates. Census 2011 gives the following picture on the population of Tribes in Idukki.
There is no clear-out definition available for the term "tribe". Anthropologists, when using the term "tribe", refer to two realities, two fields of facts which are different. They employ the term to distinguish a type of society from others and also to designate a stage of evolution in human society. The link between these two uses of the term lies in the fact that each stage of evolution is characterised by a specific mode of social organisation.
The term 'tribe' is derived from the Latin expression 'tribus' and Umbrian 'trifu', the terms designating Indo-European institutions of great antiquity. Earlier they designated a particular kind of social and political organisation functioning in society. The term was often used to refer to the largest kind of social and political community which existed before the appearance of the city state. More elementary social units were included in it, from the smallest, the Greek 'genos' and 'Phratra' and the Latin 'gens' and 'curia'. All these terms, apart from 'curia', belonged to both kinship and political technology. This implies that there was an internal relationship between kinship and political organisations. But this internal relationship has been largely hidden over the centuries, once the ancient Indo-European institutions had disappeared. These terms had, for a long time, been used indiscriminately by Missionaries, administrators, travellers and Geographists. It was Lewis Morgan, in the mid nineteenth century, who attempted to systematically analyse this social organisation in his "Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family" (1871). Morgan's definition of tribal organisation runs like this: A tribe is a "completely organised society", therefore a form of social organisation capable of reproducing itself. "It illustrates humanity's condition in a barbarian state, i.e. no longer primitive and a savage but not yet civilized not a 'political' society, nor a state. If a tribe is 'a completely organised society' one should firstly understand the 'structure and functions' of the elementary groups in it, the clans, in order to understand it. A clan is a consanguineal group of relativies, descendants of a common ancestor distinguished by a specific name and linked by blood relationships. A tribe is a collection of clans. Each tribe is individualised by a name, by a separate dialect, by a supreme government and by the possession of some territory which it occupies and defends as its very own. By 'Supreme government' Morgan meant a council of sachems and chiefs elected by gens, and in some cases, a 'supreme' chief of the tribe. Two further 'functions and attributes' of the tribe, according to Morgan, are 'the possession of common religious faith and cult' and the tribe is an endogamous group while the clan is exogamous. Tribal societies reach the 'civilized' stage at the price of the dissolution and disappearance of their clan and tribal organisation.
In the beginning of the 20th century the evolutionist theories collapsed due to the development of principles of functionalism. The concepts of tribe so far the content of which was essentially evolutionist suffered severed fissures. For Leach and Fried the names of 'tribes' simply meant 'the people'. Malinowsky, Leach and others argued that the common descent of tribal members from founding ancestors was mere fiction. To functionalists, in general, (with the exception of Evans-Printchard) Laws of functioning exist but there are no laws of their evolution or necessary transformation.
John. J. Honigmann ('Tribe' in Dictionary of Social Science, 1964) cited a classification which distinguished three types of tribe by referring to their form of political organisation as non-segmentary acephalous tribes, segmentary acephalous tribes, and the centralized tribes. Any primitive society, or atleast all stet which have no clear cut class relation or state power, can be characterised as a tribal society.
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