* Introduction

** What is a linguistic marker

According to *Wikipedia*

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  In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence.
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We need an elementary understanding of morphemes in order to understand liguistic marker.

*** Morpheme

According to *Oxford Languages Definition*.

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  The smallest unit of meaning that a word in a particular language can be divided into.
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Morphemes are further defined by the Rochester Institute of Technology [[https://www.rit.edu/ntid/sea/processes/wordknowledge/grammatical/whatare][website]] as \\
\\
A short segment of language that meets three basic criteria:

1. It is a word or a part of a word that has meaning.
2. It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful segments without changing its meaning or leaving a meaningless remainder.
3. It has relatively the same stable meaning in different verbal environments.

Using this knowledge we will try to find the linguistic markers to mark "regional identity" specifically.

Morphemes are further of two types:

1. *Free Morpheme* \rightarrow Can stand alone with a specific meaning. Example, eat, date, weak etc.
2. *Bound Morpheme* \rightarrow Cannot stand alone with meaning. Example, 's' in dogs is a plural marker telling us that there are multiple dogs.

*** Simple definition

Thus we can give a simple definition for linguistic marker as

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*A marker is either a word or a part of a word that can define the function of a word, sentence or phrase.*
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** Regional Identity

According to *[[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/regional-identity#:~:text=Regional%20identity%20is%20a%20kind,national%20and%20the%20local%20level.][J. Pohl, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001.]]*

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Regional identity is a kind of spatial identity on a certain scale called the meso-level. Regional identity is located between the national and the local level.
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Meso-level is analysis on level of communities, organizations and ethnic groups. For our case we are going to consider the city Dehradun as our region, since I have not lived outside of the city for any considerable amount of time (atleast not long enough for it to effect my dialect).