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  • Preface
    • By
  • Edited by Braj B. Kachru, University of Illinois, Chicago, Yamuna Kachru, University of Illinois, Chicago, S. N. Sridhar, State University of New York, Stony Brook
  • Book: Language in South Asia
  • Published online: 04 May 2010
  • Print publication: 27 March 2008, pp xv-xvi
  • View extract

    Summary

    This volume is the sixth in the series initiated by Cambridge University Press twenty-six years ago. The first book in the series was Language in the USA, edited by Charles A. Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath (1981). The inspiration for the present volume on Language in South Asia came from Ferguson and Heath's pathbreaking contribution. It was the late Professor Ferguson who, in his inimitably persuasive way, suggested to one of the editors of the present volume the desirability and importance of a book on Language in South Asia. That was in the late 1970s, when Language in the USA was in the final stages of publication.

    Charles A. Ferguson, affectionately called Fergi, was a committed scholar in South Asian linguistics in more than one sense. Thom Huebner, once a faculty colleague of Ferguson at Stanford University, succinctly summarizes Ferguson's “longest standing interests” in South Asia that goes back to 1945. It was then that Ferguson published his first article on South Asian linguistics. Since then, adds Huebner,

    he has published nearly twenty others, he has co-edited a major volume on the topic (Ferguson and Gumperz, 1960), and there has been at least one volume of South Asian linguistics dedicated to him (Krishnamurti, 1986). In “South Asia as a Sociolinguistic Area,” Ferguson highlights some features of language use that make South Asia unique. In the process he demonstrates how features of language use just as well as language structure can cluster in real relationships. Not only does the paper deepen the reader's understanding of the region, it also suggests that this type of research into the language situation of a larger geographical region can have implications for theories of language change and cultural diffusion in general.

    (1996: 21)
  • Introduction: languages, contexts, and constructs
    • By
  • Edited by Braj B. Kachru, University of Illinois, Chicago, Yamuna Kachru, University of Illinois, Chicago, S. N. Sridhar, State University of New York, Stony Brook
  • Book: Language in South Asia
  • Published online: 04 May 2010
  • Print publication: 27 March 2008, pp 1-28
  • View extract

    Summary

    There are multiple constructs of South Asian language contexts. The region has been characterized, in great exasperation, as a linguistic “problem area,” a proverbial Tower of Babel. These metaphors apply to South Asia as a whole, to the State of India, and to each distinct region. A penetrating observer of Indian society and culture, V. S. Naipaul, portrayed this land of his ancestors as “a country of a million little mutinies.” But the crises of the mutinies, reassures Naipaul, “were the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India's growth, part of its restoration” (1990: 517–18). Naipaul, of course, was not specifically thinking of the region's language conflicts, but if he were, he would not be entirely wrong. Those linguistic mutinies, the long history of the subcontinent tells us, have ultimately proved to be creative conflicts in many ways.

    The Indian subcontinent comprises seven sovereign states: India (population 1,095,351,995), Pakistan (165,803,560), Bangladesh (147,365,352), Nepal (28,287,147), Sri Lanka (20,222,240), Bhutan (2,279,723), and Maldives (359,008). But linguistically speaking, these political divisions cloud the extensive underlying – and deeply shared – chronicles of literary and sociolinguistic histories of the present seven states of the subcontinent. The major language families of South Asia are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Munda. The region's diversity also manifests itself in religious pluralism, representing Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism.

    The South Asian region comprises almost 25 percent of the global population.

Language in South Asia
  • Language in South Asia
  • Edited by Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, S. N. Sridhar
  • Published online: 04 May 2010
  • Print publication: 27 March 2008
  • View description
    South Asia is a rich and fascinating linguistic area, its many hundreds of languages from four major language families representing the distinctions of caste, class, profession, religion, and region. This comprehensive new volume presents an overview of the language situation in this vast subcontinent in a linguistic, historical and sociolinguistic context. An invaluable resource, it comprises authoritative contributions from leading international scholars within the fields of South Asian language and linguistics, historical linguistics, cultural studies and area studies. Topics covered include the ongoing linguistic processes, controversies, and implications of language modernization; the functions of South Asian languages within the legal system, media, cinema, and religion; language conflicts and politics, and Sanskrit and its long traditions of study and teaching. Language in South Asia is an accessible interdisciplinary book for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, language planning and South Asian studies.
  • World Englishes and English-Using Communities
  • Braj B. Kachru
  • Journal: Annual Review of Applied Linguistics / Volume 17 / March 1997
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2009, pp. 66-87
  • Print publication: March 1997
  • View extract

    This survey includes studies published mainly—but not exclusively—during the 1990s and focuses on literature that brings to the debate on world Englishes theoretical, conceptual, descriptive, ideological, and power-related concerns. The concept “world Englishes”—its genesis and its theoretical, contextual, and pedagogical implications and appropriateness—has been discussed during the past two decades in several programmatic studies and conference presentations (see B. Kachru 1994a). The concept, though not necessarily the term “world Englishes,” gradually evolved during the post-colonial period after the 1960s. It refers to the recognition of a unique linguistic phenomenon, and particularly to the changing contexts of the post-1940s. It was during this period that post-Imperial Englishes were being gradually institutionalized in the language policies of the changed political, educational, and ideological contexts of what were earlier the colonies of the UK and the USA. The earlier tradition of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic acquisition of English, its teaching, and its transformations were being reevaluated by some researchers. The major concerns of this reevaluation include the implications of pluricentricity (Clyne 1992), the new and emerging norms of performance, and the acceptance of the bilingual's creativity as a manifestation of the contextual and formal hybridity of Englishes. In other words, a critical evaluation of earlier paradigms was slowly initiated.

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