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Laria is a minority language in Orissa spoken by a migrant commuity, the Agharias. It belongs to the Madhya Desia (Central group) of the Indo Aryan language family and is used only for in-group communication among the Agharias of Orissa.

Laria is a verb-final language and it has all the characteristics of SOV languages except that it has pre-verbal negatives. This typological inconsistency still persists may be because the dominant language in th area, Sambalpuri, also has preverbal negatives. Laria has three kinds of coordination i.e. conjunctive au, disjunctive nihele adversative kintu. In Laria WH-word deletion is not possible in co-ordinated sentences as in English. There are four kinds of subordination devices in Laria-Relative constructions. The relative constructions are the relative - correlative type with a relative pronoun and correlative marker. There are two complementizers in Laria - a pre-sentential complementizer je and a post-sentantial comlementizers which is the quotative belke. Laria has a Relative Participial strategy with the presence of tense. Laria also conforms to the Keenan & Comrie's Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Laria has te following types of interrogatives: yes/no questions, WH-questions, echo questions and alternative questions. The yes/no operator in Laria is ka which occurs at the end of simple sentences. In complex sentences the yes/no operator occurs only after the matrix clause verb showing that it has scope only over the matrix clause. In WH-questions or interrogatives the interrogative marker is in-situ. Echo questions are to four types. Yes/No echo questions, Question word echo questions, Question word question echo questions and Yes/No question echo questions. Alternative questions are formed by adding the disjunctive co-ordination marker ki. Negation, in Laria, is expressed by the negative particle ni which is pre-verbal. Laria also has a focus particle n to focus the negation in the sentences. Reflexive pronoun in Laria is nije and reciprocal marker is u):kr - u):kr . Principle A is obeyed in Laria. The emphatic particle is homophonous with the reflexive pronouns nije.

In morphology all the four word formation processes are used viz., inflection, derivation, reduplication and compounding. The plural markers in Laria are mne and gera, mne being generally used for [+ human] and gera for [-human]. gera seems to have been borrowed from Oriya gud?a. The case markers in Laria are: nominative Ø, accusative la, dative la, locative upre, bhitre, pakhe, ablative nu, commutative sa?ge, instrumental thi. Verb inflection in Laria is very closed and is most resistant to change. Derivational word-formation processes have mainly been borrowed from Oriya and Sambalpuri. Reduplication is also a word formation process used in all parts of speech Echo wors are formed as in the example, ba:g - bugi. a:m - umi, etc.

Laria has seven oral and five nasal vowels. For the mid-vowels e and o, nazalisation is not phonemic. There are twenty nine consonants in the phonemic inventory. Laria has a large number of diphthongs and tripthongs. It also has a large number of consonant clusters in medial position especially with liquids in the C2 position.

Laria, as said earlier, is a minority language which has been in contact with dominant languages like Sambalpuri and Oriya for more than 400 years. All Laria speakers in Orissa are compound bilinguals, therefore the language has borrowed heavily in all areas of grammar viz., lexicon, phonology, syntax and morphology. Lexical borrowing has been overwhelming. Only 6% of the basic word list has been retained by the average native speaker. It goes up to a maximum of 18% in the case of the respondents (especially female) above 65 years of age. Thus language maintenance varies wit sex. Women are better language retainers than their male counterparts. The phonemic inventory of Laria is now the same as that of Sambalpuri. The most obvious change is the change from "  . In syntax, participial construction are being used in the verbal repertoire more often than relative constructions. The quotative has many extended functions. Negative relative participle and negative conjunctive particple have become grammatical in the language. The growing need of new words has resulted in large scale appropriation of the Derivational Morphology of Oriya and Sambalpuri. Laria has adopted the Sambalpuri numeral system, The classifier ta has also been borrowed from Sambalpuri/Oriya. Inflections have the least interference due to its closed nature. There is no stylistic shrinkage in the language.

Thus study further supports the conclusion that language conflation and not language loss is the hallmark of languages in contact at least in India (Abbi 1991). The hierarchy of borrowing can be shown as below:

High Lexicon
Phonology

Ease of Borrowing Syntax
Derivational
Morphology
Inflectional

Bearing in mind the proposition that languages shift coupled with language loss will eventually result in language death, the case of Laria was evaluated as an exemplification of gradual death. Apart form the linguistic aspects language attrition depends on socio-linguistis and other external factors. The ecological models of Haugen (1992) and Edwards (1992) were employed to test the language against the queries called from the questionnaires provided therein. The conclusion derived from the perlustrastion was that even when most of the ecological factors favoured language shift, the attitude of the Agharias towards their language fostered the persistence of Laria as a medium of in-group communication. In Dressler's proficiency continuum, around 90% of the informants fall into the criteria I & II i.e. "older fluent speakers" and "younger fluent speakers". This also exemplifiers the positive attitude of the majority of the speakers towards their language.

In India, language maintenance and not language shift is the observed pattern, even in adverse conditions for the language. Micro factors like psychological interdependence, emotional attachment, joint family or extended family structure, religionand beliefs are independent of macro factors like education. urbanization, economic development, social mobility, dominant/dominated a somewhat different context, every society has two kinds of values (i) "instrumental" and (ii) "catagorial or independent". Instrumental values provide motivation to adopt the language instrumental in the process of modernisation and development. In Indian society, even when there has been an adoption of the values of modernisation, traditional or "categorical or independent" values have not been totally rejected. This argument can be carried over to the realm of languages.

Thus the minority group maintains its identity and linguistic idiosyncracies even in adverse situations. Close knit family structures and strong ties to their roots are basic features of the Indian society. Language is a very important identity marker and therefore mother tongue is very personal to the speakers. The 'Agharia Samaj' encourages the use of Laria in in-group communication. Langauge is therefore functional for its native speakers and "co-existence" and "compromise shape" are the criteria rather than language shift.