Specimens of Languages of India: Including those of the Aboriginal Tribes of Bengal, the Central Provinces, and the Eastern Frontier

This 1874 work by Sir George Campbell, a British government official whose Scheme for the Government of India is also reissued in this series, presents a survey of the diverse languages of India, using material obtained usually by British army officers trained by Campbell to collect ‘specimens’ in the course of their normal work. The tabular material is presented with the English words or phrases in one column and their equivalent in the Indian language under discussion in another: most of the languages are represented by more than one dialect, such as the ‘Punjabee of Lahore’ and the ‘Punjabee of Mooltan’. In his introduction to the work, Campbell emphasises that the survey is not scientific, and his main conclusion is that in addition to the broad division of Aryan and Dravidian language types, India contains a huge number of ‘aboriginal’ languages which will require further study.