This grammar provides a grammatical description of Palula/ an Indo-Aryan language of the Shina group. The language is spoken by about 10/000 people in the Chitral district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. This is the first extensive description of the formerly little-documented Palula language/ and is one of only a few in-depth studies available for languages in the extremely multilingual Hindukush-Karakoram region. The grammar is based on original fieldwork data/ collected over the course of about ten years/ commencing in 1998. It is primarily in the form of recorded/ mainly narrative/ texts/ but supplemented by targeted elicitation as well as notes of observed language use. All fieldwork was conducted in close collaboration with the Palula-speaking community/ and a number of native speakers took active part in the process of data gathering/ annotation and data management. The main areas covered are phonology/ morphology and syntax/ illustrated with a large number of example items and utterances/ but also a few selected lexical topics of some prominence have received a more detailed treatment as part of the morphosyntactic structure. Suggestions for further research that should be undertaken are given throughout the grammar. The approach is theory-informed rather than theory-driven/ but an underlying functional-typological framework is assumed. Diachronic development is taken into account/ particularly in the area of morphology/ and comparisons with other languages and references to areal phenomena are included insofar as they are motivated and available. The description also provides a brief introduction to the speaker community and their immediate environment.
