The paper deals with associative plurals in New Indo-Aryan languages, which are derived from the Old Indo- Aryan apara ‘other’. These markers are found in a large number of NIA languages, but in many of these languages they underwent further grammaticalization into other grammatical units, such as honorific particle, standard plural marker, definiteness marker, marker of inalienable possession etc. Among the factors which underlie this grammatical development, contacts with non-Indo-Aryan languages play a significant role.

The paper deals with the first digital corpus of texts in the Koraput Munda languages (Sora, Gutob, Bonda), which became available online in Spring 2020. Koraput Munda are spoken in India on the border between states of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh and they all are more or less endangered. Texts in these languages were collected during four expeditions to the state of Odisha in 2016–2018. Koraput Munda speakers live in communities, which differ in religions, traditional occupations, dialects and are influenced by various official languages depending on the state. For example, Sora speakers belong to more than six religious communities and use four types of writing. Therefore, one of the main tasks of the corpus is to present texts of various genres and different social conditions of language usage. At the moment, the corpus includes oral and written texts, poetry and prose, religious, folklore and traditional everyday content. Oral texts are presented both in phonological transcription and in audio and video recordings. The sub-corpus of written texts presented in various scripts contains both texts related to a particular handwritten genre, as well as samples of printed materials. The texts are provided with morphological markup and translation into Russian and English. Each text is accompanied by detailed sociolinguistic and genre-specific information. One of the most special features of the corpus is the system of tags including text format, speaker’s gender, script, genre, topic, religion etc. This project is intended not only to make linguistic materials of the Koraput Munda languages accessible for the global linguistic and anthropological studies, but also to be useful for teaching and preserving cultural heritage, in particular within the framework of the Multi-Language Education government program.

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The essay tells about the author’s experience in collecting data on vernacular astronomy of the peoples of India. The attention is paid to the mythological motif about the origin of meteors – “shooting stars”, which is widespread in two Himalayan states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and attempts to find out which element of local flora or fauna is associated in the popular mind with the stars that have fallen to the earth.

The article, based on field data collected by the authors, analyzes the modern sociolinguistic situation of the Sora language (South Munda languages, Odisha, India) in various religious communities. The religious communities such as Baptists, Catholics, Vishwa-Hindus, Animists, Mattar Banom and Alekh are analyzed. The data on the use of various languages in the religious practices of these communities is considered, accompanied by rich illustrative material. According to the findings of the authors, the preservation of Sora is most successful in the Baptist and Mattar Banom communities.