The syntax of the relative clause in the Saraswat Brahmin dialect of Konkani, an Indo-Aryan language, has been Dravidianized because of the impact of the Dravidian Kannada language, operating through bilingual speakers. The Konkani-Kannada bilingual situation is described and an explanatory account of the syntactic change is given. (Author/CLK)

The notion of language dependency presupposes that there is a hierarchy of languages in a multilingual society, and that each language is assigned a functional role in a multilingual individual's restricted or extended spheres of linguistic interaction. In South Asia, language dependency has resulted in linguistic convergence of two types: (1)…