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With the increasing practice of using regional languages in social media platforms, hate speech detection in regional languages has received the attention of researchers. In India, hundreds of languages are spoken in various forms, which are dependent on their geography, culture, etc. Recently the number of active internet users has been rapidly increasing in India, and therefore social media has penetrated the common Indian population. Though the need for proper detection and timely removal of abusive or offensive texts has increased, well-organized and labeled data for Indian languages are scarce. Almost all the regional languages in India are low-resource languages. Hence, the objective of this study is to develop an approach that will learn from relatively small volumes of Indian language data and provide state-of-the-art results. A fusion of features extracted from a fined-tuned multilingual BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and a fine-tuned Indic BERT has been proposed in this study. Since the BERT models that we have used for this work are pre-trained using a large volume of texts in multiple Indian languages, transfer learning solves the problem of low training data volume, and this makes the proposed model more generic. Three datasets for three different Indian languages namely, Bengali, Marathi, and Hindi have been considered in this study to evaluate the proposed approach. The proposed model achieved a weighted F1 score of 0.923, 0.815, and 0.924 for the Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi datasets respectively. In the Bengali and Marathi datasets, the obtained results are better than the existing best results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Various tools for measuring health literacy are designed to assess reading comprehension and numeracy in English speakers. There is a need to develop a tool in the vernacular language and estimate health literacy levels in Indian settings. The present study was conducted with the objectives to develop a Marathi version of a 14-item health literacy scale (HLS-14) to test the reliability and validity of its Marathi version and to estimate the health literacy among patients attending the out-patient department at a tertiary care centre. Methodology: The present study was conducted among 50 adult patients attending the out-patient department of a tertiary hospital from July 2022 to December 2022. The 14-Item Health Literacy Scale available in English was translated into Marathi and back-translated to English, and the final version was developed. Bilingual study subjects were asked to fill the scales on day 0 and on day 7. Cronbach’s alpha was calculated for internal validity, and the correlation coefficient was calculated for the reliability of the tool and health literacy was estimated. Results: When items of the Health Literacy Scale were analysed, all the items barring 2, 6, and 10 gave an r-value of more than 0.70, which shows good reliability of each translated item. The Cronbach’s alpha value found for the current translated Marathi questionnaire is 0.66. Internal consistency is good. The mean total health literacy score was 51.16 ± 6.81. Conclusions: A translated Marathi version of HLS-14 is developed, which is valid and reliable. The health literacy among the study participants is marginal.

Code-switching or code-mixing in spoken language is quite common. Can code-mixing also occur in a written form of a language, such as in a newspaper article, in a short story, or in a translation? This paper examines the use of code-mixing in the translation of a German short story into Marathi. Marathi is an Indo-European language that is recognized as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The article analyses whether code-mixing is used in the Marathi translation of the German short story when no other equivalents are available in the target language i.e., in Marathi or is it more of a thoughtful choice even if equivalents exist in the target language. With relevant examples, this empirical analysis further investigates the role of code-mixing in the Marathi translation of the German short story, “Der hellgraue Frühjahrsmantel” written by Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1962). The title of the translated text reads “राखाडी स्प्रिंगजाकीट” (rākhādī springjākīṭ, 2017). With this analysis, the article presents some remarkable characteristics of both the Indian language Marathi, its linguistic context and culture. The analysis can stimulate interest in Marathi and could also be useful in further research in the areas of code mixing or code switching in translation.

The advent of Multilingual Language Models (MLLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spawned innovation in many areas of natural language processing. Despite the exciting potential of this technology, its impact on developing high-quality Machine Translation (MT) outputs for low-resource languages remains relatively under-explored. Furthermore, an open-source application, dedicated to both fine-tuning MLLMs and managing the complete MT workflow for low-resources languages, remains unavailable. We aim to address these imbalances through the development of adaptMLLM, which streamlines all processes involved in the fine-tuning of MLLMs for MT. This open-source application is tailored for developers, translators, and users who are engaged in MT. It is particularly useful for newcomers to the field, as it significantly streamlines the configuration of the development environment. An intuitive interface allows for easy customisation of hyperparameters, and the application offers a range of metrics for model evaluation and the capability to deploy models as a translation service directly within the application. As a multilingual tool, we used adaptMLLM to fine-tune models for two low-resource language pairs: English to Irish (EN ↔ GA) and English to Marathi (EN ↔ MR). Compared with baselines from the LoResMT2021 Shared Task, the adaptMLLM system demonstrated significant improvements. In the EN → GA direction, an improvement of 5.2 BLEU points was observed and an increase of 40.5 BLEU points was recorded in the GA → EN direction representing relative improvements of 14% and 117%, respectively. Significant improvements in the translation performance of the EN ↔ MR pair were also observed notably in the MR → EN direction with an increase of 21.3 BLEU points which corresponds to a relative improvement of 68%. Finally, a fine-grained human evaluation of the MLLM output on the EN → GA pair was conducted using the Multidimensional Quality Metrics and Scalar Quality Metrics error taxonomies. The application and models are freely available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques of vulgarity, sexuality and class featured prominently in the social, cultural and intellectual life of post-Independence India. This article focuses on the discourse of chumban bandi (banning kissing) in the 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra and analyses how it became a particularly unique index of heightened transgressive pleasure. I situate this discourse within a larger public debate, where dominant caste middle-class elites took upon the responsibility to shepherd supposedly recalcitrant dominated castes and low-class masses towards decency, civilized action and citizenship. Many elites energetically worked on their ideology, which was rooted in high-caste, middle-class and patriarchal values to create Marathi manus and nation. Drawing upon hitherto neglected Marathi language texts, I show how elites policed the kiss to both ban on-screen kissing and paradoxically harness its energy to engage in the politics of Marathikaran (creating Marathi regional identity) and create a new Marathi identity as modern, moral and decent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence has led to renewed interest in natural language processing. Named entity recognition (NER) is a classic problem in natural language processing. Investigating named entities is a continuing concern within information extraction. Names of people, organizations, locations, events, etc. are named entities (NEs). Although extensive research has been carried out on NER, limited study exists that explores NER in the Marathi language. The paper aims to provide a conceptual theoretical framework based on the gazetteer matching technique for named entity recognition system development for the Marathi language. A combination of rules and regular expressions is considered for temporal and numerical pattern recognition. The techniques presented in this paper are systematic, clear, and effective for morphologically rich language processing tool development. The system described in the paper reports a satisfactory performance with 62.64% NE identification and 72.27% NE classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Sentiment analysis (SA) is information retrieval and computational linguistics that expresses sentiment about a specific document. Recently, research on SA has received greater interests due to the vast expansion of internet data. The comments and reviews posted online creates difficulties to the researchers, because the comments posted are written in unstructured formats with informal expressions, languages and possibly mixed languages. Most of the works on SA have been focusing only on English language but with respect to Indian languages, few works are done, especially on Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, and so forth. SentiWordNet is a useful lexical resource for determining the sentiment of a document or piece of text. There is currently no lexical resource for the Marathi language used for sentiment analysis. Therefore, this proposed research presents SA in one of the languages of Indian origin, that is, Marathi. In this paper, a new method is proposed for the development of a Marathi SentiWordNet (M‐SWN), synset‐based expansion approach using Marathi WordNet, which consists of Positive, Negative, and Neutral Polarity score, mapped from Hindi‐SentiWordNet (H‐SWN). Finally, sentiment analysis of movie reviews is carried out using M‐SWN using Bi‐LSTM based SVM classifier model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative comparative case study investigates the links between parental motivations and young (aged 4-12) heritage language learners' heritage language school attendance. The study aimed to understand parental motivations, drawing on the instrumental and integrative motivation framework. The study addresses two research questions: 1) Why do parents send their children to heritage language schools? 2) How best can we explain parental motivations in heritage language school participation? An analysis of semi-structured interviews with 15 Marathi and 15 Japanese parents revealed that both groups prefer heritage language schooling for their young children. Findings indicate that rather than instrumental motivation, it is Marathi and Japanese parents' strong integrative-affective motivations that contribute to children's heritage language schooling. This research suggests that parental motivation can more effectively be explained in terms of a continuum between instrumental and integrativeaffective motivation instead of a mutually exclusive binary state. The study underlines the importance of parental motivations in the case of young learners' access to heritage language schools and provides empirical evidence on parents' role in heritage language schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language comprehension has been a fascinating area of research for grammarians, linguists, philosophers and computer scientists alike. In Marathi grammatical tradition, a sentence is viewed from the verb-centric position in several treatises. Moreover, the complete discussion is put in a theoretical framework. The current report, the extension of earlier research on the Marathi language, adopts an experimental outlook to examine the communicative aspect of the sentence in colloquial (non-standard variety) Marathi written conversations. Based on the subjective reports of 95 native and non-native readers obtained from four experiments it is argued that a single-verb in a conversation is comprehensible hence can be regarded as a complete sentence itself. The contrastive analysis suggests that complete sentences are easier to process than single-verb sentences, which in turn, are more accurately comprehended than nominal sentences. Resorting on textual and sociolinguistic variables, the report also probes into the underlying nuances of language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Tools to screen perinatal depression are developed in English and for their effective use in culturally and linguistically diverse settings it is important to translate them appropriately, contextually adapt them, and rigorously validate them in the local populations. Marathi is the third most spoken language in India, yet there is no culturally sensitive translation of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) into Marathi till date. In this paper, we describe the systematic process of translation and adaptation of the EPDS into Marathi. Methods: EPDS was translated into Marathi using the following steps: forward translation, bilingual committee discussion, cognitive interviewing and pre-testing, backward translation, and comparison of the original English version with the back-translated English version (linguistic equivalence). Ten pregnant women were initially involved in cognitive interviewing and provided feedback on the Marathi version. Further, conceptual equivalence was tested with 20 non-pregnant women with bilingual skills and operational equivalence to compare self-administered and interviewer-administered version was completed with 20 pregnant women . Scatter plot, Bland-Altman plot, and Pearson's correlation coefficient were estimated to assess the relationship between the two versions: English and Marathi in case of conceptual equivalence and self-administered and interviewer-administered in case of operational equivalence. Results: Pearson's correlation coefficient between the original English version of the EPDS and the Marathi version of the EPDS was 0.99 (p

Sarcasm Detection is a task of predicting whether the given text is sarcastic or not. Considering the challenges in detecting sarcasm in a sentiment bearing text, sarcasm detection has become one of the hot research areas in Natural Language Processing. Considerable amount of research has been done in this area for foreign languages such as English, Czech, Italian, Dutch, and Indonesian etc. Small amount of work in this area is also available for Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali etc. However, Marathi being the third most popular language in India lags far behind in this area. One of the most crucial reasons for this is the absence of proper dataset. In this paper, we present MarathiSarc - a dataset of labeled Marathi tweets for sarcasm detection. This dataset contains 2400 tweets in Marathi language. Further we also discuss our dataset collection and the annotation policy. Finally we present some of the baseline sarcasm detection experiments performed on this dataset. The dataset is made publicly available at https://github.com/patilpravin91/MarathiSarc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's digital era, the proliferation of vernacular languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, and Malayalam cannot be overlooked. The social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are great sources of opinionated content for these languages. The work to analyze public opinions has been concentrated on English, with very few Sentiment Analysis studies of minor or morphologically rich languages like Marathi. Moreover, it is a challenge to investigate the results of Sentiment Analysis with the local context for the under-resourced languages. This paper presents the sentiment prediction work over Twitter for the Marathi language using supervised machine learning techniques. The first-ever attempt experiments on the dataset for the Marathi political tweets. The benchmark dataset of 4248 tweets for the four major political parties of Maharashtra (India) is created. The Multinomial Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines with both linear and RBF kernel, Logistic Regression, and Random Forest are used to train classifiers considering the Term Frequency vs. Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) as features to classify the tweets as positive or negative. The performance of the Sentiment Analysis model is evaluated using the standard measures viz., accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score. The experimental results evidence that the Multinomial Naïve Bayes outperforms among all the classifiers with the maximum accuracy of 87.29% in the prediction of the Indian State Assembly Election 2019. The proposed model ranks first in the list of Naïve Bayes classifiers employed for the current state-of-the-art sentiment analysis of Indian text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore and evaluate the effect of stopwords in retrieval performance of different Indian languages such as Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati and Sanskrit. The issue was investigated from three viewpoints. Is there any impact of non-corpus-based stopword removal on chosen Indian languages (if yes, to what extent)? Can we recommend, based on experiment, a number of stopwords for chosen Indian languages that are good enough from retrieval point of view? Is there any relationship of stopwords with average document length from retrieval perspective? It is observed that the stopword removal generally improves mean average precision (MAP) significantly compared with the case when it is not done. For each language, different lengths of the stopword list are explored and evaluated that lead to suggesting its optimal length. We also study the effect of stopwords on retrieval performance over document length. The effect of stopwords is generally found to be quite low in short documents compared with their long counterparts across the four Indian languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigated the effect of filtered speech stimulus on speech perception performance of native speakers of Marathi as a function of degree of hearing impairment. Speech identification score (SIS) testing was performed to measure speech perception on three groups (Group I, Group II, and Group III consisted of participants with moderate, moderately-severe, and severe sensorineural hearing impairment respectively). Speech stimuli comprised eight word-lists with each list consisting of 25 words in Marathi. The first seven word-lists (first to seven) were filtered at 500 Hz, 1000 Hz, 1500 Hz, 2000 Hz, 2500 Hz, 3000 Hz, and 3500 Hz cut-off frequencies, respectively, while word list 8 was left unfiltered. Although, the SIS improved with increase in cut-off frequency, the improvement in SIS with increase in cut-off frequency of speech stimulus was noticed up to 3000 Hz, 2500 Hz, and 2000 Hz for participants of Group I, Group II, and Group III, respectively. In addition, the improvement in speech perception performance did not correspond to what would be anticipated with an increase in the cut-off frequency of speech stimulus for participants of Group II and Group III compared to participants of Group I. Although, there was a significant reduction in SIS as a function of the degree of hearing impairment for speech stimulus filtered at 1500 Hz, 2000 Hz, 2500 Hz, and 3000 Hz cut-off frequencies, there was no significant effect of degree of hearing impairment on SIS for speech stimulus filtered at 500 Hz and 1000 Hz cut-off frequencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A quality of life (QoL) assessment tool needs to be translated and validated in the language of the participants to whom it is administered. Therefore, the oral health impact profile-14 (OHIP-14) scale, developed originally in English, has been translated into different languages like Hindi, Gujrati, etc. The Marathi version of OHIP-14 will be useful to assess in regions where the Marathi language is prominently spoken. Thus, the present study was carried out to translate and validate the Marathi version of the OHIP-14 instrument to measure the oral health-related quality of life. Aims & Objectives: To translate and validate the English Version of the OHIP-14 instrument in the Marathi Language. Materials and Methods: This was a descriptive cross-sectional study in which 128 participants were selected through a convenient sampling method. The English version of the OHIP-14 was translated using the forward-backward translation technique, and participants were given English and the Marathi versions of the OHIP-14 questionnaire. The filled questionnaires were subjected to statistical analysis. Result: The difference in mean scores was not statistically significant(p=0.828). Pearson's correlation coefficient test was 0.999, suggesting that the translated Marathi version is highly correlated with the original English version. Conclusion: The Marathi version of OHIP-14 is a valid, and reliable instrument for assessing QoL among the population who speak Marathi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilingual inscriptions in Marathi and Persian are known through the period of the Deccan sultanates. This paper investigates whether the inscriptional programs, usually with Persian as the dominant language, can provide greater cultural context and meaning to processes such as translation and multilingualism in the period. Bi- and multi-lingual inscriptions are intended usually for public display and demonstrate the relative prestige and power of languages and cultures. The corpus of Persian and Marathi bilingual inscriptions will be analyzed to examine whether they are actually translations that achieve equivalence of content or whether localized texts were created to address the needs of the audiences in different languages, perhaps as "idiomatic bilinguals." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Various tools for measuring health literacy are designed to assess reading comprehension and numeracy in English speakers. There is a need to develop a tool in the vernacular language and estimate health literacy levels in Indian settings. The present study was conducted with the objectives to develop a Marathi version of a 14-item health literacy scale (HLS-14) to test the reliability and validity of its Marathi version and to estimate the health literacy among patients attending the out-patient department at a tertiary care centre., Methodology: The present study was conducted among 50 adult patients attending the out-patient department of a tertiary hospital from July 2022 to December 2022. The 14-Item Health Literacy Scale available in English was translated into Marathi and back-translated to English, and the final version was developed. Bilingual study subjects were asked to fill the scales on day 0 and on day 7. Cronbach's alpha was calculated for internal validity, and the correlation coefficient was calculated for the reliability of the tool and health literacy was estimated., Results: When items of the Health Literacy Scale were analysed, all the items barring 2, 6, and 10 gave an r-value of more than 0.70, which shows good reliability of each translated item. The Cronbach's alpha value found for the current translated Marathi questionnaire is 0.66. Internal consistency is good. The mean total health literacy score was 51.16 ± 6.81., Conclusions: A translated Marathi version of HLS-14 is developed, which is valid and reliable. The health literacy among the study participants is marginal., Competing Interests: There are no conflicts of interest., (Copyright: © 2024 Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care.)

This article provides an optic for understanding the genre of the Marathi love lyric, lavani (lāvaṇī), and its emotionality. The genre reached its greatest popularity during the turn of the nineteenth century, receiving broad popular support as well as patronage from the Maratha State. Often contrasted with the povada (povāḍā), defined essentially as a heroic ballad that recounts the feats of larger than life historical persons, the two have been seen in tandem, paired for their characterization of masculine valour and feminine eros. Each genre, relying on the other to form a complete picture, providing the appropriate context in a dialogue of genres. Despite the contrast and obvious references to warfare in the povada, however, most scholars have not acknowledged the eros of lavani as a product of its historical circumstances. Instead, generations of scholars have often characterized lavani as immoral, about women who are ready to swindle heroic men out of their hard-earned riches – riches earned from plunder and warfare in the eighteenth century. In this article, I steer away from moralizing discourses, and instead historicize the lavani's aesthetics and emotionality within the contexts of warfare, displacement, and slavery – the material conditions under which lavani reached its apex. I consider the emotional language of the lavani as a desire for social intimacy, attachment, and protection, rather than an attempt at duplicity. The Maratha State frequently sold slaves for revenue generation, and often even granted slaves in lieu of payment; these activities disproportionately affected women. In reading the lavani genre, especially the woman's voice, within its historical contexts, therefore, I argue for a materialist understanding of the lavani's emotionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We investigated the effect of spectrally modified speech on speech perception of native speakers of Marathi. Methods: A total of eight word-lists with each list consisting of 25 words in Marathi were used as speech stimuli. The speech stimuli in List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5, List 6, and List 7 were spectrally modified by filtering them at 500 Hz, 1000 Hz, 1500 Hz, 2000 Hz, 2500 Hz, 3000 Hz, and 3500 Hz cutoff frequencies, respectively. The speech stimuli in List 8 were unfiltered. The speech identification score (SIS) testing was performed as a measure of speech perception using eight word-lists on a total of 125 normal hearing native speakers of Marathi in the age range between 18 and 25 years. Results: The results revealed that there was a statistically significant effect of spectral modification on speech perception. An increase in cutoff frequency of speech stimuli was analogous to increase in speech perception performance. The normal range of SIS (90%–100%) was achieved for speech stimuli filtered at 2500 Hz cutoff frequency. Conclusion: Although speech is a broadband signal, the findings of this study suggest that the spectral information till 2500 Hz is sufficient for optimum perception of speech of Marathi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: The Common Object Token (COT) test is used in clinical settings to assess the complex closed-set speech perception skills in children with hearing impairment. Aims: The translation, adaptation, and validation of the COT test for the Sinhalese language of Sri Lanka served as a model for the study presented here. The same procedure was used to adapt the original English-language test to the Marathi language of West India. The finalized Marathi version was tested on children with normal hearing (NH). Its applicability to pediatric Marathi-speaking cochlear implant (CI) recipients was demonstrated. Materials and Methods: The forward/backward translation method was used to translate the original English-language test into Marathi. The Marathi version was assessed, adapted, and finalized by healthcare professionals and teachers who are native Marathi speakers and competent speakers of the English language. The finalized version was administered to 100 children with NH (mean age: 5.6 years; range: 2.7-9 years). Sixteen recipients of CIs manufactured by MED-EL (Innsbruck, Austria) were tested with the finalized Marathi version (mean age: 7.5 years; range: 3.5-12.5 years). Results: The original English-language COT test was designed with two levels of subtests arranged in an order of increasing difficulty. The subtests of each level of the finalized Marathi version were shown to follow this arrangement, which could be observed from the test scores in both the children with NH and the children with CIs. A strong correlation between the total score and each subtest score for both levels 1 and 2 were found in both groups. Good internal reliability and consistency were observed in the group with NH for both test levels. Conclusions: The COT test was translated, adapted, and validated for Marathi by administering it to children with NH. The finalized Marathi version was easily administered to pediatric CI recipients. It is recommended as a standard, validated tool for assessing the speech perception of pediatric Marathi-speaking CI recipients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jau Mi Cinemat? written by Shanta Apte (1916–64), a prominent singer–actress with a career spanning nearly three decades in the Marathi film industry, has only recently come to the critical attention of film scholars. A translation of the book will be a valued addition to the archive of film and gender studies. With a view to making a beginning in that direction, this piece contextualizes the book followed by a translation of two of its chapters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses an unexplored case of long distance agreement (LDA) in Marathi in which agreement takes place across an embedded subjunctive clause. In this construction, three distinct heads- an embedded verb, a matrix verb and what appears to be a clause-introducing complementizer-like morpheme- agree with the embedded object. The paper demonstrates that the subjunctive clause embedded in the LDA construction is a restructured clause lacking several functional projections such as TP, NegP and the entire CP layer. Further, it argues that the complementizer-like agreeing morpheme is a clause-linker attached lower than the CP-layer (à la den Dikken 2006). LDA in this construction is mediated by this clause-linker and the restructured nature of the clause it introduces. The analysis in this paper is based within the Minimalist framework of probe-goal mechanism of Agree.

Introduction Quality of life questionnaires have been increasingly used in clinical studies to help estimate the magnitude of problem. Sino-Nasal Outcome Test -22 (SNOT-22) is considered to be a good tool to measure the severity of Sino-Nasal Diseases. As this test is in English, it may be difficult for the local population to express their symptoms correctly. Therefore we have translated and validated the SNOT- 22 test in local Indian language, Marathi. Materials and Methods An early Indian ( Marathi ) version of the SNOT 22 questionnaire was prepared. This was a prospective study,where forty patients with Sino-nasal Diseases confirmed on DNE & CT(PNS) filled the questionnaire. This was repeated after a period of 14 days to retest. For validation the questionnaire was also filled by healthy individuals. Results The mean SNOT-22 score ± SD was 50.17 ± 18.65 (range 10–93) in the initial test, and 49.61 ± 18.40 (range 21–91) in retest in the study group. Cronbach’s alpha was 0.835 and 0.837 at the initial and retest examination respectively, both values were suggesting a good internal consistency. The mean SNOT-22 score ± SD was 13 ± 11.68 in the control group and 49.61 ± 18.40 (range 21–91) in the sino-nasal disease group and proved by Mann- Whitney U test. Conclusion The Marathi SNOT-22 is a valid instrument to assess the symptomatology of patients of Sino-nasal Diseases in Maharashtra.

Introduction Quality of life questionnaires have been increasingly used in clinical studies to help estimate the magnitude of problem. Sino-Nasal Outcome Test -22 (SNOT-22) is considered to be a good tool to measure the severity of Sino-Nasal Diseases. As this test is in English, it may be difficult for the local population to express their symptoms correctly. Therefore we have translated and validated the SNOT- 22 test in local Indian language, Marathi. Materials and Methods An early Indian ( Marathi ) version of the SNOT 22 questionnaire was prepared. This was a prospective study,where forty patients with Sino-nasal Diseases confirmed on DNE & CT(PNS) filled the questionnaire. This was repeated after a period of 14 days to retest. For validation the questionnaire was also filled by healthy individuals. Results The mean SNOT-22 score ± SD was 50.17 ± 18.65 (range 10–93) in the initial test, and 49.61 ± 18.40 (range 21–91) in retest in the study group. Cronbach’s alpha was 0.835 and 0.837 at the initial and retest examination respectively, both values were suggesting a good internal consistency. The mean SNOT-22 score ± SD was 13 ± 11.68 in the control group and 49.61 ± 18.40 (range 21–91) in the sino-nasal disease group and proved by Mann- Whitney U test. Conclusion The Marathi SNOT-22 is a valid instrument to assess the symptomatology of patients of Sino-nasal Diseases in Maharashtra.

Introduction: Compensatory Articulation Disorder (CAD) is frequently seen in individuals with Cleft of lip and Palate (CLP). Speech intervention with metacognitive strategies in these individuals requires a long period of time. Objective: To study the use of metacognitive strategies in therapeutic intervention of individuals with Cleft of Lip and Palate. Methodology: 14 Marathi speaking Children with CLP between 4 to 6 years of age were evaluated for language and articulation. 7 Speech Language Pathologists devised Percentage Correct Consonants on the Photo Articulation Test for Articulation pre and post intervention. Language measures were compared pre and post therapy on the Receptive Expressive Emergent Language Scale. Results: There was a significant difference between articulation and language measures pre and post intervention respectively which is attributed to the use of metacognition strategies. Conclusion: Severity of CAD and effectiveness of strategies used for correcting articulation errors are linked to one another. Assessment of CAD and therapy scaffolding metacognition strategies can be used in Speech treatment of individuals with CLP.

Background and Purpose: One of the most important patient-centered outcomes in patients with stroke is quality of life. Apart from physical affection, stroke affects cognitive, emotional language along with social functioning. Stroke-specific quality of life (SSQOL) is a measure to assess the quality of life in patients with stroke. The aim of this study is to investigate the reliability and validity of Marathi version of SSQOL in patients with stroke. Methodology: Translation of SSQOL in Marathi language was performed in accordance with the published guidelines. Validation of Marathi version of SSQOL was carried out by 130 patients with stroke with minimum 1 year of duration of stroke. Reliability was measured with the help of 36 volunteers diagnosed with stroke. Results: There were no major changes in the translated version, except in three items. Reliability was found to be 0.82 and validity was found to be 0.93. Floor and ceiling effects were found to be 11.3% and 6.3%, respectively. Conclusion: Marathi version of SSQOL is a valid, reliable instrument for measuring self-reported health-related quality of life in patients with stroke.

This paper revisits the language contact situation in the Indian border town-village of Kupwar originally reported by Gumperz and Wilson (1971. Convergence and creolization: A case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian border. In D. Hymes (ed.), Pidgnization and creolization of languages, 151–168. Cambridge: CUP). The study presents evidence for morpho-syntactic variation and complexification in the contact varieties of the local languages, Marathi and Kannada. Similar patterns of variation are adduced from contact varieties of Marathi and Kannada from historical data as well as present-day border villages which, like Kupwar, have been traditionally bilingual. The synchronic and historical data point out methodological and theoretical limitations of the original study. The variation and complexity observed in the Kupwar varieties allow for a reconsideration of the notion of intertranslatability or isomorphism in convergence areas. While suggesting a possible geographically defined micro-linguistic area at the Marathi-Kannada frontier, the paper indicates that the recent re-drawing of state boundaries along linguistic lines may have initiated divergence in this convergence area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe our work in Spoken language Identification using Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) and analyze the effect of various visual speech units used to transcribe the visual speech on language recognition. We have proposed a new approach of word recognition followed by the word N-gram language model (WRWLM), which uses high-level syntactic features and the word bigram language model for language discrimination. Also, as opposed to the traditional visemic approach, we propose a holistic approach of using the signature of a whole word, referred to as a "Visual Word" as visual speech unit for transcribing visual speech. The result shows Word Recognition Rate (WRR) of 88% and Language Recognition Rate (LRR) of 94% in speaker dependent cases and 58% WRR and 77% LRR in speaker independent cases for English and Marathi digit classification task. The proposed approach is also evaluated for continuous speech input. The result shows that the Spoken Language Identification rate of 50% is possible even though the WRR using Visual Speech Recognition is below 10%, using only 1 s of speech. Also, there is an improvement of about 5% in language discrimination as compared to traditional visemic approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tumultuous politics of the post-Independence period in Bombay/Mumbai, and the creation of the linguistic states, released multiple and contradictory energies towards a re-examination of the Marathi language and its valence in linguistic, literary, social and cultural contexts. This essay employs the bilingual poetry of Arun Kolatkar and the Marathi-language poetry of R.K. Joshi to show the ways in which the sathottari poetry of Bombay engages with these socio-political questions of language and region by channelling the principles of concrete poetry and making the visual presence of the language (in its script, its lines, its presence on the page) a part of its meaning-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations, that redraw the boundaries of literary histories both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. The essays and translations foreground complex and politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and non-fictional print materials and thus draw meaningful connections between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals, and gender and sentiment. Collectively, they expand vernacular literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to theorise the nature of writing in South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significant role of the verb in the sentence semantics has been established by various theories of verbal cognition in ancient Sanskrit literature as well as in the modern Linguistics. While a few theorists explain a sentence from a structural point of view, others consider the semantic aspect of it. We study the very first sentence-definition given by an ancient Indian grammarian and philosopher Bhartŗhari in the second chapter of his magnificent work 'Vākyapadīya' (circa 5th Century CE) which attributes the status of a sentence to a single-verb in the conversations. This paper attempts to investigate the cognitive aspect of this definition along with a contrastive analysis of purely nominal sentences, and complete sentences to explore the interplay among them. The subjective reports of 100 neurologically healthy Marathi native and non-native speakers obtained from two web-based experiments suggest that the single-verbs in Marathi conversations are certainly comprehensible and hence can be regarded as a complete sentence. With the contrastive analysis, it is observed that, even though single-verb sentences and nominal sentences seem difficult to process, average Marathi readers understand them with similar effort as they process complete sentences. A few sociolinguistic variables which might affect the data such as age, gender, first language and period of language acquisition are taken into consideration while analysing the data and some inconsistencies among the results are noted. The effect of some textual features such as difficulty and familiarity with the text are also discussed. We account for the results by performing a statistical significance test using a standard t-test and z-test formulations and also by offering general remarks, observations, and discussion. The data is validated by calculating the inter-annotator agreement. Some limitations with respect to the data set, methodology and participants are given along with the possible future work before concluding the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixteenth-century Marathi poet-saint Eknāth is better known for his devotional songs (abhaṅg) and allegorical drama-poems (bhārūḍ) than his "philosophical" writings. These writings include commentaries on and distillations of Sanskrit texts that feature a highly localized form of Advaita, or non-dualist Vedānta. Rather than consider them vernacular translations of the classical traditions of Advaita, I propose to read Eknāth's philosophical works as embedded in a local context of non-dualist thought that filtered into the elite world of Sanskrit knowledge-systems. I provide examples from his Marathi commentary on the Sanskrit Hastāmalaka Stotra, a brief versified teaching on Advaita Vedānta. I also look at the para-textual material bracketing the content and some of the accompanying manuscript record, in order to understand the context for circulation and transmission of this material among Eknāth's various readers over generations. My general attempt is to understand how ideas and practices belonging to local, vernacular networks filter into elite Sanskrit systems of knowledge—that is, not just into flexible genres like purāṇa but into disciplines, like Vedānta, that are generally viewed as impervious to the world around them. From my perspective, all knowledge is local, even that articulated in such cosmopolitan languages as Sanskrit. In Eknāth's vernacular Advaita, we find evidence for a much wider scope for the movement of ideas, one that moves not from top-down but bottom-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes up for analysis how couples were represented in the cover art of the Marathi women's magazine, Stree, from 1935 to 1965. Stree was the longest continuously running women's magazine in Marathi (published from 1930 to 1986) and had a strong visual identity that benefited from cover images painted by noted artists. I focus here on a contrast that is evident between how couples were represented before and after Independence. Between 1935 and 1947, the hallmark image on the covers was the romantic couple, with alluring women as central figures. After Independence, between 1947 and 1965, the romantic couple receded from view and was replaced by scenes of comfortable and responsible mothering and domesticity. Depictions of premarital romance dropped, and women became components in a household tableau rather than the focus of romantic pursuit. In contrast with the Anglicised notions of glamour used in the 1930s, we also find a more explicitly Hindu aesthetic in the frequent representations of religious rituals and weddings. I treat these changing themes as an expression of the visual idiom of nation-building in mid twentieth century India. The increasing Hinduisation of couples in Stree covers reflects a post-Partition ethos of channelling conjugality along specifically majoritarian religious lines. The shunning of frivolity and the turn towards family and nation-building in this cultural text illustrates, in effect, how nationalism can shore up and promote very segregated gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research paper analyzes the speech act of Correction performed by the Marathi speakers both in English and Marathi languages as a response to three situations each in English and Marathi demanding speech act of correction in Discourse Completion Tests. For the purpose, the responses of50 post-graduate students of Shivaji University to Discourse Completion Tests in English and Marathi are collected and analyzed by preparing a model of speech act of Correction. Thefocus of study is to explore the manner and nature of speech act, the semantic strategies in 'which the head act is realized, the organization structure of the response and the preferred supportive moves. The analysis and the resultant conclusions are presented in terms of comparison between English and Marathi Correction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]