The Need of Forming a Comprehensive Odia-English Linguistic Inventory

Abstract

This paper attempts at presenting a proposal for the review of teaching and learning of English in Odisha in the light of multilingualism. The factors hindering communicative competence and performance should not be undermined. There should be continuous effort to form a commonly accepted comprehensive Odia-English linguistic inventory which must include the interlingual translation of the words, sentences and common expressions of all the coastal, western, southern and northern Odisha with their respective variations in systems of morphological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic norms and then the equivalent English translation needs to be formulated so as to be used both for academic and professional purposes. The paper gives some word and sentence level models collected from empirical evidences and propose that the inventory needs to guide to point out influence of mother tongue (MTI) while learning English. This would definitely help measuring linguistic compatibility between Odia and English, code-switching and code-mixing, bilingual proficiency, interlanguage factors too.