Santali is an Austro-Asiatic language spoken throughout eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. It is currently written in multiple scripts, including a Roman script devised by missionaries in the late nineteenth century, various Indic scripts, and an independently derived script, Ol-Chiki. Each of these script systems entails different sound-to-script relationships, especially for phones such as the word-final glottalized consonants, which are not present in the dominant Indo-European vernaculars. This article traces the historical transformations of sound-to-script relations in the various scripts of Santali and tracks in particular a Romanized Santali transcription orthography that developed as a way to mediate between different scripts. The Romanized Santali form assumed a particular importance as Santali speakers started using Santali in digital and online spaces due to software limitations. However, the differing use of variants within the script to represent sounds such as word-final glottal consonants shows that what appears to be a novel orthography is in fact a “trans-script,” rhematizing the historical and ideological trajectories of the various script systems already in use in nondigital domains. The article claims that the Romanized “trans-script,” though internally diverse, has been deployed to further the standardization project and cultural politics associated with the Ol-Chiki script.

Present in many of the world's languages, expressives (also called ideophones or mimetics) are commonly discussed as iconic ‘depictions’ of speaker's sensual experiences. Yet anthropologists and linguists working with these constructions have noticed that they also index ‘social types’ that perdure across interactional events. This article analyzes the semiotic relation between depiction and social stereotypes embedded in expressive use by examining video data from interviews with speakers of Mundari, an expressive-rich Austro-Asiatic language spoken in eastern India. Presenting interview data taken from both lab-based elicitations as well as ethnographic interviews in Mundari-speaking villages, the article claims that speakers deploy multimodal resources such as gesture and gaze in concert with expressives in order to re-intepret social indexes as felt, embodied experiences (rheme) while also juxtaposing these experiences with elements in the immediately perceptible material world (dicent). The article also addresses issues of ethics, agency, and materiality entailed by multimodal expressive depiction. (Ideophones, multimodality, materiality, embodiment, semiotics)*

This article discusses the way in which assemblages of technologies, political institutions, and practices of exchange have rendered both language and script a site for an ongoing politics of authority among Santals, an Austro-Asiatic speaking Adivasi (Scheduled Tribe) community spread throughout eastern India. It focuses particularly on the production of Santali-language print artefacts, which, like its dominant language counterparts, such as Bengali, has its roots in colonial-era Christian missions. However, unlike dominant languages, Santali-language media has been characterized by the use of multiple graphic registers, including a missionary-derived Roman script, Indic scripts such as Devanagari and Eastern Brahmi, and an independently derived script, Ol-Chiki. The article links the history of Santali print and graphic practice with assertions of autonomy in colonial and early post-colonial India. It then ethnographically documents how graphic practices, in particular the use of multiple scripts, and print technologies mediate a contemporary politics of authority along vectors such as class and generation within communities that speak and read Santali in the eastern state of West Bengal, India.