Grammatical Sketch of Banarasi : A Dialect of Bhojpuri

The present paper is demonstration of the effort made to draw “Grammatical Sketch of Banarasi”. Banarasi, a dialect of Bhojpuri, is still an oral tradition in Varanasi and demands for its culture to be preserved. Therefore, this work is an initiative towards documenting the present day local language of Varanasi. A spoken corpus of folk stories in Banarasi was collected and transcribed as part of this research work which was extended and eventually contributed for creating Bhojpuri corpus (Singh and Banerjee, 2014). The paper covers the phonological, morphological and syntactic analysis of the language and also touches discourse at the level of code-mixing and code-switching in present form of language. The features like PNG (person, number and gender), TAM (tense, aspect and mode), cases, verbs, qualifiers, particles, classifiers, reduplication, causativization, ergativity, negation, particle, expressive, words of perception, kinship and focus etc are discussed in detail.