Published Paper Details:

Kasaba is a tribal community living in the Nilgiris. It has got its own linguistic system and it has been studied by many linguists viz. Zvelebil,K (1971) Shanmugam S.V(1974) ChidamparanatanPillai (1976) and so on. But, in modern days, the language of Kasaba tribe gets changed because of the impact of urbanization, modernization, social changes and modern communication network. That leads to loss of age old linguistic entities and its originality: So, Kasaba language has to be studied sociolinguistically, for protecting and preserving it as no effort in this regard it has been carried out so far. This paper, thus, tries to understand the sociology of Kasaba language, the attitudes of Kasaba tribes towards their mother tongue, the linguistic situation prevail in their living environments (both in settlement and in main-stream region), their understanding over their language and the level of bilingual competence they have in their mother tongue, and reginal language (Tamil). Around 40 informants representing some social unvaribles viz. gender, age, education and floatingness, have been approached and their views have been elicited and through a questionnaire the corpus have been analysed qualitatively and quantitatively, for drawing inferences.