Betreuung: Hannes Fellner, Nina Mirnig

In the period around 500 BCE to 500 CE, not only Vedic and Sanskrit were used in South Asia. A large number of other language varieties of Indo-Aryan are attested for that time. The similarities and differences between Old and Middle Indo-Aryan varieties were mostly elaborated on by researchers by drawing upon a small number of selected linguistic features. I will take a quantitative approach, however. One strength of quantitative, especially dialectometric methods is that a bigger amount of data sets can be processed. Dialectometry is quantitative dialectology per se and has the advantage that results and classifications can be based on broader, more profound data basis.

The objective of my dissertation is twofold: on the one hand, its aim is to gain insight about the linguistic relations of Old and Middle Indo-Aryan language varieties. On the other hand, it is going to contribute to the discourse about dialectometric methodology by applying different approaches and comparing the thereby gained results.

I am tackling my research questions by examining the edicts of the emperor Aśoka, who was enthroned in 268 BCE and commissioned inscriptions throughout his realm spanning over a major part of South Asia well into modern-day Afghanistan. They were inscribed on rocks, pillars, and in caves and have mostly legal or ethical content. The interesting part about them is that some of them contain the same or roughly the same text and they were inscribed in different dialects at different locations.

Based on the linguistic results, I want the look at the inscriptions with a socio-cultural lens. Finally, I want to investigate what the distribution of certain linguistic features and varieties tell us about mobility and power structures.