Braj-bhāṣā and the languages of Eastern Rajasthan. In search of a history of mutual relationship

Even if in the last few years a renewed interest from some of the scientific community in the first period of NIA has resulted in a lot of in-depth studies (field expeditions, data collection and corpus collation), more work needs to be done in the area of diachronic research on NIA languages. Starting with the assumption that if we want to understand the linguistic evolution and/or the history of Hindi, it is necessary, first and foremost, to study the history and linguistic development of the Western Hindi languages employed for literary purposes prior to the 19th century – even though it seems that these languages do not stand in direct linguistic antecedence to Khaṛī-bolī (and thus to Modern Standard Hindi) –, in the present paper special attention will be paid to one of these pre-modern Hindi literary languages, that is to say, Braj-bhāṣā. The main goal of the analysis is to search out and examine the fluid linguistic milieu that probably lay at the roots of a more fixed, standard (and in some cases more advanced) form of the Braj language. To achieve this, data from primary written sources will be taken into account, with special attention given to prose texts.