A Comparative Study of Bangla and Sylheti Grammar.

Sylheti is spoken in the Sylhet district of Bangladesh, and the Barak Valley region of the Indian state of Assam (famous for Assam tea) holds the largest population of Sylheti speakers after Sylhet. Although it does not have a language status, it is often referred to as an Independent language by many Sylheti scholars. (Sebastine, 2007). We saw that in India, Sylheti is currently getting influenced by the Bangla language of the Indian state of West Bengal. Mostly in the use of lexicon, we noticed that, urban educated speakers prefer more Bangla lexicon over Sylheti while the uneducated rural Sylheti speakers do the opposite. More interestingly, we have studied the socio-economic, religious as well as geographical divides that have segmented the language significantly. Besides the study of the lexicon this thesis is centered around the development of Sylheti grammar relative to that of Bangla, which enabled us to see the similarities as well as the stark departures. Previous works (Bhuiya, 2000), (Chanda,2013), were in the direction of describing the Sylheti script, Sylheti History, origin of the script and briefly the Sylheti Grammar (Mayenin, 2011). On the other hand in this thesis, we have tried to build a big picture, to study most of the grammatical features of the language which is a step towards building a comprehensive grammar of the language. We have also tried to build up the Sylheti grammar relative to that of Bangla and tried to study in detail both Bangla and Sylheti Grammars along with their phonological and Morphological features and discussed in details their similarities and dissimilarities.