Colin Masica

Besides being a specialist in Indo-Aryan languages, much of his work was on the typological convergence of languages belonging to different linguistic families in the South Asian area and beyond (see below), more broadly on this phenomenon in general, and on possible explanations for it and implications of it in connection with both linguistic and cultural history.

At the University of Chicago, he taught Hindi at all levels, and occasionally other South Asian languages, along with North Indian cultural history and literature, for three decades.

His magna opera are Defining a Linguistic Area: South Asia and The Indo-Aryan Languages.

The latter surveyed more than a century of linguistic research on the many Indo-Aryan languages and dialects of North India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

In his seminal Defining a Linguistic Area: South Asia and other writings, Masica drew on studies and grammars of both South Asian and non-South Asian languages by various European (especially Russian), British, American, Indian and other Asian scholars, to demonstrate the typological parallels among the Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda, Tibeto-Burman languages of South Asia and with the Iranian and Altaic languages (including Korean and Japanese) of Central and Northeast Asia, in comparison with types prevalent beyond this zone.