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,

Introduction

Hindi is a New Indo-Aryan language spoken in the north of India. It belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken by more than two hundred million people either as a first or second language in India, and by peoples of Indian origin in Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa, and many other countries. It is the official language of India, and English is the associate official language. In addition, Hindi is the state language of Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh.

Urdu, a language closely related to Hindi, is spoken by twenty-three million people in India and approximately eight million people in Pakistan as a mother tongue. It is the official language of Pakistan, the state language of Jammu and Kashmir, and additional state language of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in India.

Hindi and Urdu have a common form known as Hindustani which is essentially a colloquial language (Verma 1933). This was the variety that was adopted by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress as a symbol of national identity during the struggle for freedom. It, however, never became a language of literature and high culture (see Bhatia 1987 and Rai 1984 for an account of the Hindi–Urdu–Hindustani controversy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).

Background

It is difficult to date the beginnings of the New Indo-Aryan languages of India.

Introduction

All social and ethnic groups operate within a cultural context, and as such, culture becomes a relevant parameter in any discussion of social and ethnic interaction. Before discussing the role of language in interaction in South Asia, it is necessary to briefly examine what is meant by culture and what aspects of culture are relevant to this discussion.

As Halliday (1993: 11) observes, the relationship between language and culture is not deterministic. Rather, “culture and language co-evolve in the same relationship as that in which, within language, meaning and expression co-evolve.” What I attempt to do in this chapter is to look at the interaction of language and culture as it manifests itself in strategies of oral and written interaction in South Asia.

The chapter is organized as follows: the first section discusses the interface of the relevant aspects of culture and language in social interaction in the South Asian context, the second section focuses on the general conventions of verbal interaction, and the third section concentrates on the traditions and constraints that operate in academic discourse in South Asia. The conclusion presents a summary of the discussion and points to areas of research that need attention.

The cultural context of language

First, “culture” is not an easy concept to define. It has been defined in many different ways in the anthropological literature.