Linguistic Diversity in South Asia, Reconsidered

1981

This work attempts to provide an overview of liuguistic diversity in South Asia and to place this diversity in a cultural context. The work tries to describe the current state of knowledge concerning socially conditioned language variation in the subcontinent. Each of five major language families contains numerous mutually intelligible and unintelligible dialects. Different dialects of a language may be required for 'written and spoken use and for different social groups. Bilingualism and multilingualism are common for communication between groups. Language choice is important for education, politics, radio and television. Chapter 2 of this book enumerates criteria used in the taxonomy of language forms, discussing a number of theories of dialect formation from the points of view of linguistic innovation and diffusion of linguistic change. Chapter 3 surveys literature on classification of South Asian languages. Chapter 4 considers South Asia as a distinct linguistic area and Chapter 5 evaluates literature on South Asian social dialects. Chapter 6 examines linguistic codes encompassing elements from more than one autonomous language. Chapter 7 considers the ways in which the lexicon of South Asian languages and dialects contain elements that structure themselves into concrete systems. (CHK)

1999

As is well known, South Asia is home both to a vast number of different languages and dialects (belonging to at least four different language families 1) and to extensive regional and cross-regional bi-and multilingual interactions between various combinations of these languages. This highly diverse and complex linguistic picture is paralleled by a similarly diverse and complex ethnic panorama. The relationship between the linguistic and ethnic scenes, in turn, rather than being one-to-one, is likewise of a highly complex nature. Breton's Atlas attempts to map the resulting complex panorama, with focus on the linguistic side, and drawing mainly on data provided by the censuses which have been conducted every ten years since 1881. Among these censuses, the 1961 census furnishes the foundation for most of Breton's presentation. Part I is devoted to a 'General presentation of the languages and ethnic communities of South Asia'. Chapter 1 (16-20) deals with 'India as an exemplary laboratory for the coexistence of languages and ethnic communities'; Chapter 2 (21-39) is concerned with 'Language compared to other ethnic traits', including 'race', tribe, and caste. Chapter 3 (40-42), bearing the somewhat mysterious title 'From language dynamics to linguism', is especially concerned with the politics of language and the creation in India of 'linguistic states', i.e. of states defined not in terms of the political situation in colonial and precolonial South Asia, but on the basis of majority languages. (This is the development that the term iinguism' apparently refers to.) Part II (43-189) is entitled 'The sixty plates with commentaries'. Different geographical plates (or more accurately, maps) and accompanying mini-chapters are devoted to 'The languages of India' (Plate 1), 'Indian languages and scripts in the world' (Plate 2), 'Official languages' (Plate 3), different geographical regions (Plates 4-36), 'Non-regional languages', including Sanskrit (Plate 37), English (Plate 38), and (other) non-Indian languages (Plate 39), 'The linguistic states, the media, and the metropolitan situations' (Plates 40-44), 'Ethno-linguistic issues throughout the subcontinent and around', including plurilingual states elsewhere in the world (Plates 45-50), and 'The linguistic situation up to the 1991 census' (Plates 51-60).

Handbook of the Changing World Language Map

In the context of the modernization debate, social scientists have argued that there is a negative association between linguistic diversity within the country and economic development. India is a land characterized by "unity in diversity" amidst a multicultural society. This is represented by variety in culture such as different languages religions, castes, house types, dance forms, and dietary patterns (Noble and Dutt, India: cultural patterns and processes. Westview Press, Boulder, 1982). Of these cultural traits, language is an important instrument of cultural identity since it is through this medium that different groups of people identify and communicate with one another and the world and express a sense of identity to a place. Often social tensions emerge when a certain segment of society feels ostracized from social and economic processes of development due to lack of knowledge of the dominant and prevalent language. Also, it is argued that the most linguistically diverse states in India are more literate and highly

Economic and Political Weekly Vol - XLIX No. 1, January 04, 2014 , 2014

South Asia's high rate of language endangerment is yet to be discussed in relation to human development and this paper examines it in terms of the political philosophy of human development. It discusses the sociopolitical contexts in which multilingualism, language endangerment, and linguistic justice are constituted as subjects of political philosophy and looks into the postulated correlation of linguistic diversity with human development. No significant correlation of human development with language diversity is observed at the global level, but a fuzzy correlation is found in south Asia. Four normative statements are derived and negotiated with political philosophy to rationalise the discourse on language endangerment in south Asia. Based on this, the paper points out that development with diversity has to be the political philosophy of this region

Dominated Languages in the 21st Century: Papers from the International Conference on Minority Languages XIV, 2015

The present paper deals with the status of linguistic minorities in India and tries to give an overview of the problems plaguing Indian language policy regarding minority languages. India represents a unique case in the current global linguistic scenario, as it is the only country in the world with 23 official languages (2 official cross-regional languages and 21 official regional languages). Despite this fact, minority languages in India cannot be regarded as well protected, as obvious from the high number of languages listed as ‘endangered’ by UNESCO. The paper looks into the various forms of domination and subordination that dictate the language policy and influence the various language communities in India, including linguistic minorities. Moreover, it undertakes an analysis of the various kinds of language conflicts prevalent in the Indian linguistic situation and examines whether the language conflicts emanate from group-specific dominance and unequal status ascriptions, and secondly, whether language is simply a secondary feature in conflicts that are mainly socially, economically and politically motivated. Lastly, the paper addresses the aspect which it sees as a highly questionable part of Indian language policy, i.e. the principle of ‘rationalization’, a method developed by the Government of India to take account of the number of ‘languages’ in India, but which has been widely criticized as a ‘reductionist’ policy because through the process of ‘rationalization’, smaller and minority languages are categorized as ‘dialects’ or ‘variants’ of the so-called major languages and are thus deprived of their own independent status and identity.

Eurasia Border Review, 2020

Drawing on examples from the linguistically-diverse Himalayan region, in this contribution we explore three main questions. First, we ask how language boundaries both contribute to and defy the imagination of the nation-state. Second, we investigate how such boundaries are transcended and become redefined through increased mobility and technological innovation. And third, we examine what it means for languages to become detached from the landscapes in which they were traditionally situated and historically spoken. Unfixed and unfixable, languages resist the limitations and constraints of nation-states—both colonial and contemporary—that strive to delineate their boundaries along “clear” and often monolingual lines. In the Himalayan region in particular, plural linguistic identities challenge reductive national logics that seek to bind or appropriate languages for hegemonic and ideological goals. Not only are national borders decreasingly relevant for the maintenance and transmission of languages, but the global dispersal of people and the languages they speak, sign and write are combining with accessible digital media to transform internally maintained language borders as well.

2005

Language Ideologies and the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia, 2024

This introduction sets some keynotes for the edited volume of which it is a part. It briefly surveys the modern South Asian language situation and calibrates our take on language ideologies.

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