These methods are now also being applied to historical aspects of South Asian languages (e.g., Peterson, 2017b Ivani et al., 2020 Borin et al., 2020 Liljegren, 2020). In the past three decades, further developments in typology have taken place which allow us to go farther back in time even when no written sources from this earlier period exist (e.g., Nichols, 1992). Contact studies today continue to play an important role in South Asian linguistics, although the focus has since shifted away from viewing all of South Asia as a single “language area” or Sprachbund, with most studies now focusing on micro-areas of variation (e.g., Saxena, 2015). These two authors’ works were followed by numerous further studies on contact phenomena in South Asia, most notably Masica (1976). 1 Similarly, Bloch (1934) already noted similarities between the different language families of South Asia, and some 20 years later, with the publication of Emeneau (1956), the topic of language contact in South Asia reached a much larger linguistic audience. For example, Sir William Jones’s famous lecture in 1786, in which he calls attention to the similarities between Sanskrit (Old Indo-Aryan ) and the classical languages of Europe, such as Greek, Latin, and others, was instrumental in the development of Indo-European studies (Szemerényi, 1996: 4). The languages of South Asia have long played an important role in historical and contact linguistics. The study also confirms the results of other studies which suggest that different areas of grammar, such as nominal and verbal systems, may be affected to different degrees in language contact and that their respective rates of (re)complexification may also differ. The results suggest that 2,000–2,500 years ago eastern and western Indo-Aryan languages were spoken in very different sociolinguistic environments, with a high degree of ethnic and linguistic diversity in eastern India and a comparatively low level of diversity in the west.

Based on assumptions made in sociolinguistic typology (e.g., Trudgill, 2011), which forms part of a larger research program investigating the effects of social factors on language structures, this study attempts to reconstruct various aspects of prehistoric society based on the structures of these two modern languages as typical representatives of eastern and western Indo-Aryan, respectively.

The present study compares two Indo-Aryan languages, Sadri and Konkani, with respect to their morphological complexity.

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