Colin Masica

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Colin P. Masica (1931-) is professor emeritus in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. He is a renowned authority in the linguistics of Indo-Aryan languages. At the University of Chicago, he taught Hindi and Urdu at all levels for four decades and publishsed on both languages. In addition, he's presented research on many of the other North Indian languages. His magnum opus is The Indo-Aryan Languages, which surveyed more than a century of linguistic research on the many languages and dialects of North India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. It was written as part of the University of Cambridge's surveys of many of the language families of the world.

In addition, Masica was involved in the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia project funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The aim of this project was to develop a comprehensive database in each of the major South Asian languages.

Although Masica's professional specialization is in South Asia, he has learned many other languages to a high level of fluency. In his research, he freely drew on studies published in English, French, Spanish, German as well as Indian languages. He also has studied dozens of other languages and, although he knew these well enough to use them in his work, he modestly denied fluency in them. In Defining a Linguistic Area: South Asia, he drew on this knowledge to develop a set of criteria which aimed to exhaustively define South Asian languages, both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, and to distinguish these from other languages.

[edit] Publications

Krishnamurti, B., Colin P. Masica, Anjani K. Sinha. South Asian Languages: Structure, Convergence and Diglossia Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986. ISBN 8-12080-033-8
Masica, Colin P. The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-52129-944-6
Masica, Colin P. Defining a Linguistic Area: South Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. ISBN 0-22650-944-3
Masica, Colin P. "Review of A Korean-English Dictionary by Samuel E. Martin; Yang Ha Lee; Sung-Un Chang" in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 70, No. 5 (Oct., 1968), p. 1042
Paul Masica, Colin and Sanjib Baruah. "Assamese" in Jane Garry and Carl Rubino (eds.), Facts About the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages: Past and Present. New York/Dublin: H. W. Wilson Press, 2001.
Zide, Norman H., Colin P. Masica, K. C. Bahl, A. C. Chandola. A Premchand Reader. Honolulu: Published for the South Asia Language and Area Center, University of Chicago, by East-West Center Press, 1965.