Clipping Patterns in Sindhi: A Morphological Analysis of Word Shortening

Abstract

Sindhi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in the Sindh province of Pakistan. This study focuses on the clipping processes in the Sindhi language, particularly in relation to word shortening with respect to meaning and grammatical class. Its aims were to identify salient types of clipping, explain their structural patterns, and examine their consequences semantically. Employing qualitative methods, data was gathered through observation at a wedding and informal conversations in Nawabshah which produced 15 instances of clipping. The analysis shows that the most prominent type of clipping is back-clipping (mother to "ما") where suffixes and final syllables are removed. Other types included phonetic reduction (“نرمي” to “نرم”, soft) and some cases of front–clipping (“دروازو” to “در”, door). The results indicate that while clipped forms still convey the primary essence of the word, they are more dependent on situational context and therefore more informal, often devoid of grammatical attributes such as gender or number. This research addresses a gap in the study of morphology of Sindhi and contributes to the understanding of the processes of word formation in the language.