Tag: linguistics

New Book on Indo-European Migrations Says ‘Out of India’ Theory ‘Firmly Refuted’

The authors of ‘The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited’ use the examples of the Out of India theory and Nazi German nationalism to warn against the political misuse of new genetic research that has impacted our understanding of the Indo-European migrations.

New Delhi: A new book on Indo-European migrations has cautioned against the misuse of new genetic findings for political and ideological reasons, including by citing an example from India.

Titled The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited, the book brings together 41 authors and examines the impact that research on ancient DNA has had on our understanding of the spread of the Indo-European languages in prehistory.

The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics
Ed. Kristian Kristiansen, Guus Kroonen, Eske Willerslev
Cambridge University Press (July 2023)

It is edited by well-known archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, linguist Guus Kroonen and geneticist Eske Willerslev and the contributors include familiar names J.P. Mallory, David W. Anthony and Alexander Lubotsky.

“We must be aware of the huge popular interest in the new genetic results, and the need to constantly and critically debate their dissemination … where complex knowledge can sometimes be transformed into dangerous stereotypes,” the book says in its introduction.

It continues: “One of the most destructive political misuses of the past has been in constructing nationalist narratives of exclusion”.

The Indo-European languages are a family of languages that includes English, German, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati, as well as classical languages like Latin and Sanskrit.

These languages are all ultimately descended from a common ancestor language which scholars call Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Since there is no direct record of its existence, scholars have hypothesised what PIE words were like through a method called comparative reconstruction.

Where the original PIE speakers lived has been long contested: some say they lived in the steppes of what is today southern Russia, while others say they lived in what is today Turkey.

But the authors of Revisited say that evidence from breakthrough genetic studies in 2015 points towards the former as the PIE homeland.

Areas where the Indo-European languages are native. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Bill Williams. CC BY-SA 4.0

At the same time, they believe that the results of these genetic studies must be used to dispel racist theories that were spread about the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

“If there is anything that the recent interdisciplinary biomolecular studies have shown, it must be that the once-dominant Eurocentric and supremacist perspectives on the Indo-European homeland are not supported by any genetic or linguistic evidence,” they say in the book.

About such theories that were developed in Germany to support nationalist ideologies, they say:

“In the pre-war period, the prehistoric spread of the Indo-European languages was increasingly attributed to the superiority of an alleged Indo-European-speaking ethnolinguistic unity, which, despite all linguistic evidence to the contrary, was claimed to have developed … in North Europe.

The question of Indo-European linguistic origins was integrated into nationalist theories of German ethnic origins, which demanded a North European centre of spread.”

In the introduction, the book advises caution against nationalist theories about the Proto-Indo-Europeans from outside Europe:

“Here we should mention the rise of an “Out of India” model of Indo-European languages during the last generation, motivated primarily by Hindu nationalism. These are the same kind of forces that used the model of Gustaf Kossinna to support a Nazi racist ideology nearly one hundred years earlier.

However, the Out of India model has been firmly refuted by recent aDNA [ancient DNA] results, and it has little or no support in historical linguistic research … [It] should serve as a warning example of the political impact of nationalism, even in the present.”

The Out of India model – also known as the Indigenous Aryan theory – refers to a theory that says the Indo-European languages originated in the Indian subcontinent and spread outwards from it.

Also Read: The Nationalists Try – But India Remains Among the World’s Oldest Melting Pots

Apart from the importance of how the results of genetic studies are disseminated, Revisited also underscores that the integration of various fields such as linguistics, archaeology and genetics is necessary for the study of ancient migrations.

It talks about how each field is dependent on the other: for example, linguists depend on archaeologists to give absolute dates to communities that spoke ‘protolanguages’ (such as PIE), archaeologists depend on linguists and geneticists in order to correctly interpret how different human populations mixed with each other, and geneticists depend on archaeologists to make full sense of ancient DNA.

“The importance of the book lies in the range of scholars that it has brought together to provide a more granular understanding of the formation of the Eurasian linguistic landscape,” said Tony Joseph, author of the award-winning book Early Indians, which explains the four major prehistoric migrations that make up the Indian demography, including the migrations from the Eurasian steppe.

“From the nomadic pastoralism of the Yamnaya to the chronology of chariot-making in northern Eurasia, The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited provides a number of finer details,” he added.

The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics and Linguistics is published by Cambridge University Press and was released online in April 2023.

Why Some People Lose Their Accents but Others Don’t

You may think of your accent as a physical part of who you are – but a conscious or subconscious desire to fit in can influence the way you speak, whether you want it to or not.

The way a person speaks is an intrinsic part of their identity. It’s tribal, marking a speaker as being from one social group or another. Accents are a sign of belonging as much as something that separates communities.

Yet we can probably all think of examples of people who seem to have “lost” their regional or national accent and of others whose accent stays firmly in place.

Given the personal and social importance of how someone speaks, why would anyone’s accent change?

You may think of your accent as a physical part of who you are – but a conscious or subconscious desire to fit in can influence the way you speak, whether you want it to or not. Research has shown a person’s accent will move towards that of the group of speakers with which they identify at some stage in their lives. Accents are a fluid feature of speech. If someone moves from Australia to the US to work, for example, they will probably at least modify their accent, either consciously or unconsciously.

This may be out of a need or desire to be more clearly understood and to be accepted in a new community. They might also want to avoid ridicule for the way that they speak. Over a quarter of senior professionals from working-class backgrounds in the UK have been singled out for their accents at work.

A sense of belonging

For people whose accents do shift, the way they speak may be less important to their sense of identity, or their identity with a social or professional group may be more pressing.

Even before we are born, we are exposed to the speech patterns of those around us. Studies of newborns have found that it is possible to detect tonal aspects specific to their speech communities from their cries. To have our needs met, we are more or less programmed to fit in. We produce vocalisations that sound like they belong to our caregivers’ communities. We progress through various stages of speech development that result in us having speech patterns similar to those around us.

The way you talk is an important part of who you are. Photo: Unsplash

Emerging into society, we mix with people outside our limited social group and are exposed to more patterns of speech. This can result in a child’s accent changing rapidly to be accepted by their peers. A colleague of mine from the US, for example, who works in the UK, told me how their child had begun to speak with a standard southern English accent since starting school. The parents were now being taught by their child to speak “correct” English.

Also read: The Pain of Partition, as Seen in the Literature of Many Languages

A strong identity

For others whose accent does not seem to change, it could be because they feel secure in their identity, and their accent is very much part of that identity – or that preserving the difference is valuable to them. They may not even be aware of how much their accent means to them. If a speaker has what most deem to be a desirable accent, they might not want to lose the advantage by modifying it.

Whether consciously or not, people have at least some control over their speech when they move home. But brain damage or stroke can, in rare cases, result in foreign accent syndrome (FAS). This syndrome results from physical changes that are not under the speaker’s control. Some areas in the brain are associated with producing and perceiving language, and we also have brain regions that control the motor aspects of speech.

If these are damaged, speakers may lose the ability to speak at all or experience changes in the way they articulate sounds because the motor area is sending different instructions to the vocal organs. An extreme example, reported recently in The Metro, describes how a woman, Abby French, from Texas, US, woke up after surgery with foreign accent syndrome.

French claimed that she sounded Russian, Ukrainian or Australian at any one time. Listeners tend to guess at the accent they think the changed speech sounds most like.

In some cases, listeners might discriminate against a person with FAS as they believe them to be foreigners, which shows how much our speech can influence how others treat us. It’s no wonder many people unconsciously protect themselves by adapting their speech to those around them.The Conversation

Jane Setter, Professor of Phonetics, University of Reading

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What an 18th-Century Sale Deed Reveals About Language and Territory in the Deccan

The documents hint at more give-and-take in the scribal environment than the one-way “imperial” narrative premised on modern mono-linguistic identities.

The series ‘Many Worlds of the Deccan’ explores cultural histories and changing social relations in the Deccan region. It challenges north-centric, monolithic ways of understanding India. The series is curated by The Khidki collective, a group of scholars committed to building public dialogue on history, politics and culture.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

In the early 1700s, a moneylender called Narsingrao Ramaji got his clerk to draft a couple of sale transactions. He had sold his share in the headman’s post in a village near Dharwad in northern Karnataka to Kenchangauda, the local Desai or chief based at nearby Lakshmeshwar.

The clerk wrote up the krayapatras, or deeds of sale, in Marathi in the cursive Modi script then used to write administrative documents. I came across these documents in the household archives of Desais from the Dharwad region at the Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal in Pune. The Mandal’s legendary curator, G.H. Khare, collected these papers from family collections in the 1930s. These documents are in Perso-Arabic, Modi and Kannada scripts. I was charting a cultural history of Modi: exploring how and where the script was used, and what attitudes to it could tell us about how people thought about writing, script and language. This multiscriptal collection provides a window onto the fluidity of language practice, identity and territory in the Deccan.

The Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal. Photo: Ganesh suresh salunke/CC BY-SA 4.0

The region around Dharwad falls within the ‘doab’, the land between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers in the Deccan peninsula. Stretching northeast towards Bijapur and Solapur and north towards Belgaum and Kolhapur, it was a broad meeting zone of enduring pastoral, literary and devotional cultures that found rich, multilingual expression in Marathi, Kannada and Dakhni in various literary forms and media. Many political formations controlled this region in recent centuries, such as the Adilshahi sultanate and the Marathas. Looking north from Madras in the early 19th century, the British described this region as the “Southern Mahratta country”.

Later, it became the southern division of the Bombay Presidency, also known as Bombay Karnataka, before it was divided up between the linguistic states of Karnataka (formed in 1956) and Maharashtra (formed in 1960). Decades after linguistic reorganisation, both states claim the areas around Belgaum as their own on the basis of the number of speakers of one language or the other. But multilingual spaces, histories and practices persist. What do these broad political and linguistic geographies look like from the vantage point of documents like land grants or sale and mortgage deeds, especially in such a local archive from the 17th and 18th centuries?

The border on the NH-4 highway near Belgaum. Photo: Prachi Deshpande

Broadly, we know, Persian was the language of administration in the Deccan sultanates, with some documentation in the local vernaculars. But just how local, and which vernacular? In the Lakshmeshwar collection, documents that recorded grants of land to the Desais by the Adilshahi regime are typically bilingual, in Persian and Marathi. Among these, imperial farmans were in Persian, with a line of Marathi, and occasionally Kannada, annotation about what the farman said. Other documents could be bilingual, or also singly in Marathi. The annotations may be a clue to which language a particular Desai household, and its scribes, preferred; in the case of Lakshmeshwar, it was Kannada.

The use of the Modi script in the doab was from as early as the 16th century, as Maratha chiefs of the Adilshahi court acquired lands in jagir south of the Krishna river and developed their household establishments. In the 17th century, the spread of Adilshahi power brought documentation in Modi into the region around Mysore too. We know that it was also in use in the Qutbshahi administration to the east in Golconda, and spread deeper into the peninsula with the Maratha state at Tanjavur. The Modi script, in effect, was early on a Deccani script, in use in various genres and spaces beyond the core Marathi-speaking areas.

The Marathi prose in the Lakshmeshwar collection tends to be heavily Persianised. Often, vocabulary across bilingual documents remained much the same; the versions were different primarily in script. After Shivaji’s coronation in 1674, Maratha documentation incorporated Sanskritised conventions, but formulaic Persian phrases continued. In the 18th century, the use of Marathi-Modi grew in the area, with the deepening of the Peshwa’s revenue demand.

Village-level transactions from the 1600s, such as sale deeds in the Lakshmeshwar collection, are usually in Kannada. Sometimes witnesses signed their names in Kannada in a Marathi document, and vice versa. The scribal hand in these Kannada records has come to be called “Kannada-modi”. It is not cursive, but the characters are modified to enable speedier writing. Forms of Kannada-modi are localised too; not far off, in Goa, the Goykanadi script used in the Old Conquest areas looks very similar to the Dharwad variant, but also requires some immersion. The salutations in these Kannada-modi documents, such as svasti sri jayabhyudaya, bore similarities to older Kannada inscriptions, but they increasingly incorporated Marathi and Persian conventions too. Many modern Marathi nationalists viewed the influx of Persian vocabulary into Marathi bureaucratese as akin to an invasion, but Kannada nationalists of the early twentieth century came to view both Persian and Marathi as imperial invasions into a prior Kannada region.

Narsingrao’s sale deeds are unusual, in that they are in Marathi. Instead of kharedikhat, they are named krayapatra like the Kannada form. Also, instead of Kenchangauda bin Yellappagauda (Kenchangauda, the son of Yellappagauda), patrilineal descent is recorded as Yellappagaudacha lek Kenchangauda as they would in the Kannada letters (Yellappagaudana maga Kenchangauda, Yellappagauda’s son Kenchangauda). Perhaps they were drafted as Kannada documents, and then adapted into Marathi.

Marathi sale deed in Modi script, Lakshmeshwar daftar. Courtesy: Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal, Pune.

It could be that this shift in language and script was due to the increased presence and prestige of Marathi documentation due to Maratha control of this region.  If that is so, the Kannada krayapatra form in local scribal knowledge nevertheless imprinted itself on these Marathi documents too. This choice could also reflect Narsingrao Ramaji’s own social ‘location’. His use of the salutation sharanarthi indicates that he was probably of the jangam jati, but the only clue to language preference are the suffixes to his name – Ramaji rather than Ramappa, and Narsingrao instead of Narasingappa. The choice of language and script in witness signatures often points to language preference but such preferences or document conventions do not automatically indicate a mother tongue, or singular identity. What these documents do is offer us a trace of how Kannada conventions also crept into Marathi documentation. They hint at more give-and-take in the scribal environment than the one-way “imperial” narrative premised on modern mono-linguistic identities.

Such multilingual written records, then, give an impression of neat, separate spheres of circulation as well as sociality and identity. They show us how Persian was used at the top and Kannada at the local levels, while Marathi facilitated the reach of Persianate bureaucratic power into the countryside, and revenue from the countryside into the state’s coffers at various levels. Yet, even as the documents hint at a larger oral domain of language preference and transaction, as evidenced in Narsingrao’s unusual krayapatras, such neat written compartments also prevent us from grasping local practices of language in their diversity.

Scribal manuals, or mestaks, aimed at young men hopeful of becoming clerks in the Maratha revenue administration, display awareness of this local diversity. One manual advised clerks going into villages for revenue collection to be alert to local, or deshi, variations in names, measures and products, to ensure that village officials were not cheating them. In other words, engaging such diversity involved more than just knowing Marathi or Kannada or their scribal scripts; it meant learning a more localised vocabulary, as well as one that spanned both or more languages. Translation could mean learning and converting localised measures from fellow bilingual scribes, but also transcribing the same vocabulary into another script for circulation within a separate graphic domain. It is through such oral and written transactions that Persianate jargon came into local scribal practices, and local terminology moved into a broader bureaucratese across the Deccan.

With the emergence of separate print spheres and monolingual schools over the 19th century, Kannada and Marathi developed divergent evolutionary and literary histories. The social and cultural spaces from Kolhapur to Gadag and Solapur to Dharwad continued to overlap intensely through music, literature, religious practice, and human movement, but the administrative “domination” of Marathi became one of the principal motivating factors for the Karnataka Ekikarana movement to start in the Dharwad region. Eventually, Ekikarana and Samyukta Maharashtra produced two linguistic states with a richly bilingual, but contested border zone.

Map of the Bombay Presidency, which also shows the doab and wider peninsula without the current borders. Photo: Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Vol1. 1844.

The particular histories of language preference, inter-lingual interaction, as well as difference glimpsed in the Lakshmeshwar archive, and others like it, fall between the cracks of Marathi and Kannada linguistic imaginations. The early modern admixture of Persian and Marathi in their documents finds little place in a nationalist Kannada historiography dominated by inscriptions and a literary investment in an earlier ‘classical’ age. Modern historians of the Marathas, for their part, prioritised those documents that showcased Maratha political or military glory. They frequently only printed the Marathi/Modi documents, duly transcribed into Devanagari, leaving out material in Persian or other languages and scripts.

Reconstructing such local archives, with all their annotations, scripts, formulaic phrases, and documentary conventions and deviations is, however, key to recovering the tangled, yet specific, multilingual transactions that surround official language(s) of administration, then and now. It is in these situated histories of writing and archiving and their oral penumbras, that we can chart the fluid and rich processes of territorialisation – local social and linguistic geographies, as well as larger ones across the doab and the Deccan. These geographies continue in everyday life, and give us resources to imagine our lives as beyond the modern linguistic state.

Prachi Deshpande is a historian at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her book Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India is forthcoming later this year from Permanent Black.

Assam: FIR Lodged for Vandalising Hoarding in Assamese; BJP Blames ‘Third Forces’

Government signposts and hoardings in the Barak valley where more than 3.6 million people live have since the 1960s been tri-lingual, including in Bengali, which is the predominant language in the region.

Silchar/Guwahati: An FIR was lodged on Tuesday against local organisations for allegedly smearing a state government hoarding written in Assamese with black ink. The BJP alleged that third forces were trying to divide people on linguistic lines.

Cachar Superintendent of Police (SP) Ramandeep Kaur said a complaint had been lodged by officials of Jal Jeevan Mission against defacing of its hoardings in Silchar town.

“On the basis of the complaint, we have registered an FIR at Silchar Sadar police station on Monday,” she said. “Appropriate action will be taken against the culprits after investigation,” the SP added.

Government signposts and hoardings in the Barak valley where more than 3.6 million people live have since the 1960s been tri-lingual, including in Bengali, which is the predominant language in the region.

Also Read: The Economic Basis of Assam’s Linguistic Politics and Anti-Immigrant Movements

However, new hoardings put up by the state-run Jal Jeevan Mission which were defaced were in Assamese only.

Visuals showed alleged activists climbing a ladder and defacing the hoarding which was in Assamese language in front of Silchar Railway station. They also wrote ‘Bangla Likhun’ (write in Bengali) and the names of two organisations below it.

“Using the ‘divide and rule’ policy of the British, the Congress, Left parties and fundamentalist groups have been trying to bring a divide between Assamese and Bengali speakers for years now,” BJP spokespersons Ramkrishna Ghosh and Ranjib Kumar Sharma claimed in a joint statement in Guwahati later on Tuesday.

The party spokespersons alleged that a third force’ wants to disrupt the peace and harmony prevailing in the state, but their attempts have been thwarted by quick action of the administration and sensible reaction of the public.

“Assam has been home to different languages, like Karbi, Mising and Bodo, for ages and Assamese has been the unifying language for all the people. Likewise, Assamese and Bengali languages have complimented each other in their growth over the centuries,” the BJP spokespersons said.

Barak Democratic Yuva Front (BDYF) leader Pradip Dutta Roy, reacting to the FIR, however questioned the decision to use only Assamese language in Government advertisements in Barak Valley, despite a decision to use Bengali also as an authorised official language in this part of the state after a language agitation in the 1960s.

Besides the BDYF, activists of All Bengali Students Youth Organisation (ABSYO) were also allegedly involved in the defacing incident.

Silchar MP Rajdeep Roy reacting to the incident alleged it could be part of a conspiracy to incite violence in the name of language in the state and warned “people from falling prey to such designs.” Trinamool Congress leader Susmita Dev said though she does not support blackening of hoardings, alleged the hoardings ‘disrespected’ the Language Act.

The Assam Official Language Act, 1960, adopted Assamese as the official language of the state, but included provisions for use of Bengali for all administrative and official purposes in the Bengali-majority Barak Valley of the state, comprising Cachar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi districts.

The use of Bengali language for official purposes was authorised following a mass movement by the Bengali-speaking population in Barak valley, which saw the death of 11 protestors in police firing at Silchar Railway Station on May 16, 1961.

(PTI)

Rasmus Rask: A Dane in Bombay 200 Years Ago

Unlike most travellers, Rask had not come to India in search of riches. He was seeking wealth of a different kind: the overflowing riches of Asiatic languages which he hoped would help him understand the source and antiquity of European languages.

On September 29, 1820, the Honorable Company’s cruiser Benares, which had been patrolling the Persian Gulf, docked at the English port of Bombay. It did not carry any passengers except for one, who had boarded the ship at Bushehr. Evidently a stranger to these parts, the passenger called on Mountstuart Elphinstone, the governor of Bombay, to present his credentials immediately after he alighted the vessel and passed through the Custom House.

Not only was he a foreigner without a British permit, the visitor was also skint. However, he received a warm welcome from the governor, who seems to have recognised a kindred soul in Rasmus Kristian Rask. Unlike most travellers, Rask had not come to India in search of riches. He was seeking wealth of a different kind: the overflowing riches of Asiatic languages which he hoped would help him understand the source and antiquity of European languages.

From a very early age, Rask had been attracted to the study of languages. Born in 1787, Rask had been able to obtain scholarships to study at the best institutions in Denmark. Though enrolled as a theology student at the University of Copenhagen in 1807, Rask was drawn to languages. He began a systematic study of Danish and its immediate neighbours: Swedish, English, Dutch, German, Russian and the older Gothic and Anglo-Saxon languages.

Guide to the Icelandic or Old Nordic language (Copenhagen, 1811).

Rask embarked on a serious investigation into the history and sources of languages from 1811, when the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences announced a competition to identify the progenitor of Scandinavian languages. Rask spent two years in Iceland studying Icelandic and other Northern languages. His essay, which eventually won the prize, concluded that these languages had an ancestor in common with Greek and Latin. Theories about language families had been bandied about for two centuries; the affinity of European languages to Sanskrit was widely known but it was only in the 19th century that systematic studies of languages and their interrelationships were undertaken. There was a fiercely competitive spirit among European language scholars and Rask, with his prodigious language skills, was well positioned to play a prominent role in the field. By 1818, he had numerous publications to his credit including grammars of the Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon languages.

Rask was no armchair scholar. Having spent two years in Iceland, he had realised the benefits of personally visiting the places where the languages he was studying were spoken. One of his theories postulated the affinity between Scandinavian and Caucasian languages. There was only one way to test this theory: study those languages firsthand, and what better way to do that than to visit the Caucasian countries. In 1818, he set off from Stockholm for St. Petersburg where he spent a year learning Russian and Sanskrit. After managing to arrange funding for his travels from the King of Denmark, he went to Moscow in 1819 from where he travelled down the Volga to the Caucasus. In March 1820, he reached Persia, his original destination. En route he studied Georgian, Turkish and Persian.

Also read: Why Languages and Dialects Really Are Different Animals

Other than being suspected as a spy in Georgia, Rask’s travels, though arduous, were pleasant enough. But he was disappointed with his experiences in Persia. Though he visited Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz, Rask was unable to access manuscripts in the ancient Persian languages. Rather than turning back disappointed, he decided to press on to Bombay by sea.

In 1820, they were two Danish settlements in India: Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) in South India and Fredricksnagore (Serampore) on the River Hooghly, a few miles north of Calcutta. However, the connections between Denmark and India were few and far in between. The journey by sea took over six months and a reply to letters written to Denmark would be received a year or two later, if at all. Only adventurers could muster the nerve to embark on such a perilous journey. It was very rare for a Danish scholar to land up unannounced in Bombay.

In Bombay, Rask was soon drawn into the Literary Society of Bombay, the hub of intellectual activities for the city’s European residents. The Society had been established in 1804 to study and document, like its Calcutta predecessor the Asiatic Society, all aspects of Asiatic culture, history and languages. Mountstuart Elphinstone, whom Rask described as “a man who may have few equals in learning and any kind of culture”, was then the president of the Literary Society. A few weeks after Rask’s arrival in Bombay, Elphinstone nominated him to the membership of the Society, which was duly accepted.

Furdoonjee Murzban (1787–1847).

When he arrived in Bombay, Rask made a surprising discovery: “I found in Bombay a considerable number of Persians (Fire-worshippers).” Since he had picked up a little Persian during his travels, he was able to converse with the Parsis and conduct a more effective search for manuscripts. And as he describes in a letter written in November 1820, “after incredible effort, I was able to reach the Source itself, which has been hidden and inaccessible to English officials. I had earnestly wished to buy the entire collection. Considering the extreme rarity and inaccessibility of these things as well as the internal value of the language (based on an examination and the history, etc.), the price was not excessive. However it was impossible for me to raise so much money.”

Though the ‘Source’ is not identified in Rask’s letters, it was a Parsi named Furdoonjee Murzban (1787–1847). He was the proprietor of a printing press, the first to be established by an Indian in Bombay. He had also been binding books for the Literary Society of Bombay from 1811. Murzban, who was the same age as Rask, was well-versed in Persian and seems to have inherited a valuable collection of manuscripts from his forefathers.

Rask also tried to learn the ancient Persian languages at Bombay. “I tried to obtain instruction in Zend and Pahlavi from the most learned Parsi dustoors, but the influence of the rich merchants over them compelled them to conceal their wisdom in the most careful way. However, I soon discovered (partly from printed books in Gujarati) that little or nothing had been lost to me, and that I could just as easily on my own discover the structure and arrangement of these languages.”

The printed Gujarati books Rask referred to were those printed by Murzban at his printing press in the previous five years. They would have included Gujarati translations of the Dabestan (1815), the Khordeh Avesta (1818) and Bundahishn (1819). Why was Murzban willing to part with his valuable collection of manuscripts? Perhaps he was aware that the Parsi community in Gujarat possessed multiple copies of these texts. Maybe he needed to raise capital to fund the newspaper – The Bombay Samachar – he would start in 1822. The price he quoted for the 30 manuscripts in his possession was Rs 1,500, a handsome sum of money for those days.

Title page of Dabestan (Bombay, 1815).

Rask, however, did not have money with him though he was expecting some funds from Denmark. The more time Rask spent in Bombay, the more his credit seems to have increased. The Bombay government extended a credit line which enabled him to meet his immediate expenses and purchase a few manuscripts. In November, he managed to obtain a loan of Rs 1,000 from Forbes & Co, one of the largest trading firms in Bombay, which enabled him to purchase the entire manuscript collection, plus a few printed books. Rask was aware that he had managed to buy an invaluable treasure: “I say with confidence that such a collection does not exist in India and even less in any other country in the world. One of the books is five hundred years old, which is an extraordinarily high age for manuscripts here in India.”

More than their antiquarian value, Rask was concerned with their use for his linguistic studies: “It is of greater value than any Sanskrit collection can now be; Sanskrit is a well-known and fairly well-structured language and there exists a lot of literature, but Zend and Pahlavi are hidden in the thickest darkness. They are based on some original written language, and also constitute one or two of the most significant links in the whole chain of tongues which is spoken by the human race.” He seems to have studied these manuscripts during his travels; from Madras, he sent an essay on the Zend language to the Literary Society of Bombay for inclusion in its Transactions. As no further volumes of Transactions were printed after 1821, the essay is now lost.

Also read: We Need New Words for New Times But Appealing to Dictionaries Won’t Work

From Bombay, Rask proceeded to Calcutta overland via Benares. He was especially looking forward to meet his fellow countrymen at Serampore. However, he fell seriously ill and suffered hallucinations during which he accused his Danish hosts of plotting his murder which, not surprisingly, soured his relations with them. He sought refuge in Tranquebar and hoped to return home direct on a Danish ship. On one hand, he wanted to stay in India for three or four years and study its languages while on the other, his health was gradually worsening.

During a brief sojourn of eight months in Sri Lanka, Rask managed to acquire a treasure trove of Pali and Sinhala palm-leaf manuscripts. That Rask was a genius in his subject is illustrated by the fact that he could compose an elementary grammar of Pali within a few weeks of his arrival at Colombo. He also printed a Sinhalese syllabary in Danish before he left Sri Lanka. After returning to Tranquebar, Rask left India in 1822 on a Danish ship and reached Copenhagen in May 1823, nearly seven years after he first left it. Thus ended his great Indian journey.

Rasmus Rask’s tombstone at Copenhagen (erected 1842).

Back home, Rask immersed himself in his language studies and continued to make important contributions to the field. As he had never graduated, he had to wait until 1831 before he was appointed professor of Oriental languages at the University of Copenhagen. Though he published a small monograph in Danish titled On the age and authenticity of the Zend language and Zendavesta (1826), he never ventured to make a deeper study of the manuscripts he collected in India. Neither did he write the much awaited travelogue. Perhaps the only reminder of Rask’s heroic trip to India is his tombstone, installed after his untimely death in 1832, which has inscriptions in Sanskrit and Arabic.

The manuscript treasures acquired by Rask in Bombay are now housed in the Royal Danish Library and have been used by successive generations of researchers to study the Zoroastrian religion and the languages associated with it. Rask is now acknowledged as one of the founders of comparative linguistics and the formulation of an Indo-European family of languages has been universally accepted.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to research associate Silvia Veronika Hufnagel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for drawing my attention to the collection of Rask’s letters, Breve fra og til Rasmus Rask (1941–1968).

Murali Ranganathan is a writer and historian researching the 19th century with a special focus on print history and culture.

Why Do Kids Call Their Parents ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’?

You can say “Mom” in any country in the world and people would pretty much know who you meant.

Once, a long time ago, one of us, Bethany, fell behind at the grocery store and was trying to catch up. She called out her mom’s name, “Mom!,” and to her frustration, half the women there turned around and the other half ignored Bethany, assuming it was someone else’s child.

How was Bethany going to get her mom’s attention? She knew a secret trick that would work for sure: Her mom had another name. She called “Denise!” and magically, just her mom (the other one of us) turned around.

But why do almost all kids use the same name for their parents? This is the kind of question we enjoy investigating as scientists who study families and human development.

The sounds heard ‘round the world

All around the world, the words for “mom,” “dad,” “grandma” and “grandpa” are almost the same. Other words aren’t nearly as similar.

Take “dog,” for example. In French, “dog” is “chien”; in Dutch, it is “hond”; and in Hungarian, it is “kutya.” But if you needed to get your mother’s attention in France, the Netherlands or Hungary, you’d call “Maman,” “Mama” or “Mamma.”

You can say “Mom” in any country in the world and people would pretty much know who you meant. And did you notice that “Dad” is also similar across languages – “Papa,” “Baba,” “Tad” and “Dad”?

Scientists have noticed the same thing. George Peter Murdock was an anthropologist, which is a scientist who studies people and cultures. Pete, as his friends called him, traveled the globe back in the 1940s and collected information about families from all over. He discovered 1,072 similar words for “mom” and “dad.”

Pete handed this data over to linguists, the scientists who study language, and challenged them to figure out why these words sound the same. Roman Jakobson, a famous linguist and literary theorist, then wrote an entire chapter on “mama” and “papa.”

The first sounds infants make are those that are made with the lips and are easily seen: m, b and p. These sounds are quickly followed by other sounds that can be easily seen: t and d. It’s possible that as infants practice making these easy sounds (mamamamama) or produce these sounds while nursing or drinking from a bottle, the mother hears “mama.” She then smiles with joy and says, “Mama! You said Mama!”

Of course, the baby is happy to see the mother happy, so the baby says it again. Bingo, “Mama” is born. Similarly, the baby may practice “dadadadada” or “papapapa” and the parents’ reactions result in the baby repeating “dada” or “papa.”

These words refer to the two most important people in most babies’ lives, followed closely by similar words for grandparents – nana, tata, bobcia, nonno, opa, omo – who often play important roles, as well.

Reinforcing everyone’s roles

But there’s more to this story. Once children can say many sounds, why don’t they call their parents Ella, Zoheb, Dipankar or Denise?

It’s because we all have rules that most of us follow. These are rules related to our cultures, our societies and even our families. We have rules for how to greet people (shake hands, hug), how to use forks or chopsticks, what to call our teacher (“Mrs. Bell”) and even where to sit at the dinner table.

We don’t think of these things as “rules”; they’re just there. One of these kinds of rules in most families around the world is that parents are the heads of the household and children are supposed to listen to them. By calling parents “Mom” or “Dad,” it helps everyone stick to their roles.

Some parents feel that if you call them by their first name, you don’t think they are the boss anymore (and parents generally don’t like that). But every family is different, which is part of what makes life so interesting. Some families have their own rules that might differ from your family’s rules.

Most kids call their mom “Mom,” but some kids don’t and that’s OK. For example, for our family rules, our kids may occasionally call us “Denise” and “Mom Bethany.”

The next time you call out “Mom!” in the store, whether in New York, Paris, Hong Kong or Durban, watch how many mothers turn around. It’s all because of a mixture of biology (easy sounds to see and make), environment (parents being happy you said this and smiling) and culture (rules).

If you have children when you grow up, what do you want them to call you?

Featured image credit: Joshua Reddekopp/Unsplash

Bethany Van Vleet, Senior Lecturer in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University and Denise Bodman, Principal Lecturer in Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Centre Spent 22 Times More on Promoting Sanskrit Than Other 5 Classical Languages Combined

The government has also not established any centre of excellence to promote Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia, the other classical Indian languages.

New Delhi: The Centre spent a whopping Rs 643.84 crore on the promotion of Sanskrit in the last three years, which is 22 times the total amount of Rs 29 crore spent on the other five classical Indian languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia, figures released by the Union Ministry of Culture show.

According to a Hindustan Times report, at the same time, the government has not created a separate fund for the promotion of Malayalam and Odia and has not established any centre of excellence to promote the other classical Indian languages.

On February 3, in response to an unstarred question by three Shiv Sena MPs and two BJP MPs, the Union Ministry of Culture released these figures.

As per the reply, the Centre held that the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) had established the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan – and allocated Rs 643.84 crore to it in the last three years – in Delhi as a nodal authority to promote Sanskrit. In 2019-20, the Sansthan was allocated Rs 231.15 crore, Rs 214.38 crore in 2018-19, and Rs 198.31 crore in 2017-18.

However, in contrast, the Centre’s spending on Tamil via the Central Institute of Classical Tamil (CICT), which comes under the MHRD, was significantly reduced.

In 2017-18, the Central Institute of Classical Tamil was given an allocation of Rs 10.59 crore, in 2018-19 it was allocated Rs 4.65 crore and Rs 7.7 crore in 2019-20. For Telugu and Kannada, the Centres of Excellence for Studies was established at the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysore in 2011. Afterwards, the Telugu Centre for Excellence was shifted to Nellore in Andhra Pradesh.

Also read: Why Must the Uttarakhand Govt Undermine Urdu to Promote Sanskrit?

“The University Grants Commission has also approved a Centre for Classical Languages in Telugu in University of Hyderabad and a Centre for Classical Languages in Kannada in Central University of Karnataka,” the Centre said.

The allocations for Kannada and Telugu were also meagre with Rs 1 crore each in 2017-18, Rs 99 lakh in 2018-19 and Rs 1.07 crore in 2019-20.

The reply to the unstarred question also said that the MHRD was “considering setting up” Centres of Excellence for Odia and classical Malayalam.

The sharp discrepancies in the allocations for promotions of different languages have brought into focus a long-standing debate among linguistic communities about which languages are conferred classical status. MPs from Maharashtra question why Marathi is not considered a classical language.

Previously, in 2014, the Rajya Sabha had held that a language was considered to be classical if there existed a “high antiquity” of its recorded history over a period of 1,500-2,000 years or if its body of ancient literature was considered valuable by generations of speakers, its literary tradition was original and not borrowed from another speech community and the classical version of the language was distinct from its modern version.

The debate about preferential treatment to Sanskrit over other languages – especially Urdu – was recently reignited when it was announced that the names of railway stations which were written in Urdu would now be written in Sanskrit which was the second official language of the state.

“Instead of Hindi, English and Urdu, the names of railway stations on platform signboards across Uttarakhand will now be written in Hindi, English and Sanskrit,” a railway official said.

Another recent incident that highlighted the growing feeling of unease about the subordination of other languages was when, last week, DMK leader Dayanidhi Maran questioned the relevance of Sanskrit in Lok Sabha which prompted heated criticism. Maran said that crores of rupees were being spent on Sanskrit and questioned as to what the government had done for the classical language Tamil.

Also read: Sanskrit and Indian Heritage: Whose Language is it Anyway?

Maran’s remarks came on the heels of a controversy on whether the rituals at the historic Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur were to be conducted in Tamil or Sanskrit.

In a statement issued on January 18, DMK President M.K. Stalin said that the temple was a symbol of the Dravidian architecture and urged that the entire ceremony be held in Tamil instead of Sanskrit

Last week at an event organised by Begur Brahmin Association, Karnataka’s deputy chief minister announced that 43 Sanskrit schools in the state would be given a grant in the upcoming budget.

“The development that we see in the country is not enough. We need to be strengthened culturally. Religious and culture work is being done in Begur Brahmin Association, along with study of Vedas. In this regard, MLA Krishnappa has decided to grant Rs 50 lakh funds to the association,” he said.

Last year in December, at a Lok Sabha debate about the Sanskrit University Bill, BJP MP Ganesh Singh cited certain studies to claim speaking Sanskrit every day “boosts the nervous system and keeps diabetes and cholesterol at bay”. He also said, “according to a [study] by US space research organisation NASA, if computer programming is done in Sanskrit, it will be flawless.” Both claims are false.

The Sanskrit University Bill, which had been moved by the Union HRD minister Ramesh Pokhriyal aimed at converting the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan and Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth in Delhi and the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth in Tirupati to central universities.

Why Must the Uttarakhand Govt Undermine Urdu to Promote Sanskrit?

While this symbolic assertion of a political ideology is unlikely to revitalise Sanskrit, it will contribute to the death of a living language Urdu.

Sanskrit is again in the news, though for different reasons in the north and south of India. In Uttarakhand, Sanskrit received institutional support from the Ministry of Railways. Now, existing Urdu signs will be replaced with those written in Sanskrit.

In Tamil Nadu, by contrast, the use of Sanskrit in the consecration of the Big Temple in Thanjavur was challenged by DMK chief M.K. Stalin. He has demanded that the shlokas be read in Tamil instead of Sanskrit because the temple is a symbol of Dravidian architecture.

Earlier, Stalin had opposed the introduction of philosophy at Anna University, arguing that this would be a proxy for Sanskrit, which according to many Dalit scholars, is associated with Brahmanical hegemony over the low-caste Bahujan-Dalits. Though apparently contradictory, stances towards Sanskrit in Uttarakhand and Tamil Nadu show the power of language as a marker of culture and identity.

What is striking about Uttarakhand is that Sanskrit will not supplement the existing languages; it will rather supplant Urdu.

Sanskrit and Urdu could well have co-existed, as is the case in street signs in Delhi, where Hindi, English, Punjabi, and Urdu coexist.

According to chief public relations officer Deepak Kumar, the Railways Manual requires that names of stations be written in Hindi, English, and in the second language of the state. Since the second language of Uttarakhand is Sanskrit, it will replace Urdu.

A photo of the current signboard at Dehradun railway station. | Wikimedia commons

A careful reading of the 2009 version of the manual, however, gives a different picture. Its section 4.9 deals with signage. It starts with the objectives of the signage and clarifies that the goal is to guide and inform passengers.

Here the Manual rightly focusses on the communicative, rather than symbolic, function of language. Section 4.9.5.15, which stipulates policies regarding language, says, ‘Static or fixed signs will be in English and Hindi.

Also read: Does the Modi Government Really Want to Promote Urdu?

In certain stations where the local population is predominant in another language the local language will also be included’. According to this, Urdu should continue, as according to the 2011 census, there are 4,25,752 Urdu speakers in Uttarakhand. There is no mention of the second official language at all in the manual. Clearly, the justification offered by the Railways violates the Manual.

At stake here are not simply the procedural inconsistencies. To understand the motivations of the decision, we need to look into history and its ideologisation.

While it is true that Sanskrit no longer has any communicative function, it has not ceased to be a symbol of identity and culture. In the Hindu nationalist ideology, often disguised as Indian and shared across the political divide, Sanskrit has been projected as an icon of India, whereby other languages such as Tamil, Pali, and Urdu, and cultures associated with them, are either subordinated or erased so that the plural linguistic and cultural history of India is reduced to one singular Sanskritic culture.

While discussing the future official language of India, in the constituent assembly, proposals were made to adopt Sanskrit. It was, however, rejected, and instead Hindi was adopted. Notably, non-recognition of Sanskrit as the official language didn’t mean its disappearance. Article 351 of the constitution specified Sanskrit as the primary source for the development of Hindi.

Only a few years after the adoption of the constitution, this ideology of Sanskrit as a synonym of India resurfaced in the reports of the Sanskrit Commission established in 1956. The commission’s task was to examine the status of Sanskrit in India. In its report, the commission expressed disappointment that Sanskrit was rejected by the constituent assembly as the official language of India.

Examining the Commission Report, Sumathy Ramaswamy shows how Sanskrit was equated with the Indian nation as if ‘there was no India outside and beyond the realm of Sanskrit’. A language confined to the upper caste men for ritual purposes in ancient India and to which people of the lower castes were denied access, she further argues, was being presented in independent India as a language for the entire nation, irrespective of differences in caste, class, religion, and region.

Also read: As We Celebrate Urdu, Let’s Not Ignore the Signs of Its Decline in India

Before I may get misunderstood as an opponent of Sanskrit, let me clarify that the works of Sanskrit scholars – for instance, Panini and Bhartrihari – fascinate me as a student of linguistics. Panini’s Ashtadhyayi is a canonical work not only for students of Sanskrit but also for general linguists.

In the last few years of BJP rule at the Centre and the states, Urdu has been targeted on many fronts. Photo: Aieman Khimji/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Similarly, I admire the linguistic contribution of the theory of Sphota by the grammarian-philosopher Bhartrihari. This theory distinguishes between an abstract meaning-bearing unit and its actual realisation in speech (dhvani). In gratitude to him, poet Muhammad Iqbal placed a versified form of Bhratrihari’s ideas on the second page of his masterpiece Bal-e-Jibreel.

Returning to the ideological mobilisation, let’s now turn to conceptions of Urdu by the Hindu nationalists. It has been viewed as a foreign language of Muslim invaders since the rise of Hindu and Hindi nationalism in the late 19th century.

Members of the Congress party such as Purushottam Lal Tandon and Seth Govind Das argued in the constituent assembly that Urdu represents a foreign culture. Shyama Prasad Mukherji, a member of Nehru’s cabinet, who later left the Congress party to found the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, was a champion of Sanskrit and accepted Hindi only as a compromise. He hoped for  Sanskrit to “reoccupy an honoured place in the national educations scheme”.

It is this Hindu majoritarian ideology that informs the policies and day-to-day workings of the BJP governments, in the states as well as at the Centre. In Uttarakhand, in 2010, Sanskrit was given the status of a second language during the tenure of the chief minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, currently the Minister of Human Resource Development at the Centre. He started his career at an RSS-affiliated Saraswati Shishu Mandir.

To claim legitimacy for Sanskrit, at the 2019 convocation ceremony of IIT Mumbai, Pokhriyal claimed, falsely, that NASA has announced that talking computers were possible only because of Sanskrit. The BJP government in Himachal Pradesh is following suit to accord Sanskrit the status of the second official language.

In the last few years of BJP rule at the Centre and the states, Urdu has been targeted on many fronts. First came the renaming of places with Urdu/Muslim names such as Allahabad, and Mughal Sarai Station into Prayagraj and Deendayal Upadhya station respectively. Clearly, the goal was to simultaneously erase Urdu and Muslim identities of the places and Hinduise them.

Also read: Why the Perso-Arabic Script Remains Crucial for Urdu

Urdu was at the receiving end on the floor of the legislative assembly of UP when, on March 29, 2017, its speaker of the house, Fateh Bahadur Singh (from the ruling BJP), quashed the oath taken in Urdu by two Muslim members. This happened despite the fact that Urdu is the second official language in UP.

Paradoxically, a day earlier, fourteen Hindu legislators had taken their oath in Sanskrit, which was considered valid. Later in the same year Musharraf Hussain, a newly elected corporator in the Aligarh Municipal Corporation, was charged with hurting the religious feelings of Hindus because he took his oath of office in Urdu. He was also assaulted by some BJP councillors.

The new move is unlikely to revitalise Sanskrit as it requires a bottom-up approach starting from elementary school; erecting signboards will not serve that purpose. All this will achieve is a symbolic assertion of a political ideology. Given the fact that it is often associated with upper-caste hegemony and discrimination against the Dalits, Sanskrit may not be attractive to them. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, in the past, has openly advocated for the adoption of English.

Whether or not the policy by the Uttarakhand government will breathe life into Sanskrit, what is clear is that it will contribute to the death of a living language Urdu, which has been struggling in Uttar Pradesh since Independence.

This is part of the broader discourse and practice of hate, bigotry, and violence against Muslims that India has seen in the last few years. This will further marginalise Muslims as a community, erase their heritage and identity, and create an exclusionary Hinduised public space.

Rizwan Ahmad is an associate professor of socio-linguistics at the department of English Literature and Linguistics, Qatar University. He tweets at rizwanahmad1.

Merriam Webster Adds ‘They’ as a Non-binary Pronoun Among 533 New Words

Merriam Webster added words like ‘free solo,’ ‘escape room,’ ‘red flag law,’ ‘fatberg,’ ‘autogenic training,’ to the dictionary.

Merriam-Webster announced on Tuesday the addition of 533 new words to the dictionary and 4,000 other revisions to definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, and dates of first known use.

Words ranging from serious to the playful, from the technical to the informal, from ‘deep state’ to ‘dad joke’ have been added to the dictionary.

Acknowledging that “they” has been consistently used as a singular pronoun since the late 1300s, Merriam-Webster announced that the word “they” can be used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is non-binary

The other definition of the word “they” included; “It’s an expansion of a use that is sometimes called the ‘singular they’ (and one that has a long history in English).” The definition added that when a reflexive pronoun corresponding to singular use of “they” is needed, themself is seeing increasing use.

While for many English-speakers, the use of “they” to refer to the genders other than male and female might seem ungrammatical, Merriam-Webster has officially put a stamp on the word.

Dennis Baron, professor emeritus of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while talking to the Washington Post, said that “Language responds to social change. Things that need to be expressed get expressed.”

Also Read: Samsung ‘Good Vibes’ App Enables Two-way Communication for the Deafblind

“Dictionaries are considered to be ‘constitutional’ authorities by many English-speakers but the reality is that they are not intended to set rules on how people should behave,” Baron said. He added, “They’re a general indication of how language is being used at a particular time.”

Merriam-Webster has added new words in different sections of the dictionary including psychology, games and sports, pop culture, politics and law, new abbreviations, race and identity. New words were also integrated into sections of linguistics and business and finance.

“Words can come and go in a language, but those that show staying power and increasing use need to be recorded and described. In other words: they need definitions.”

Read the blog post of Merriam-Webster. 

Featured image credit: Facebook

We Need New Words for New Times But Appealing to Dictionaries Won’t Work

Why should an Indian English speaker look to the West to validate her variant of English when the vitality of the Indian English language is in fact its own validation?

In a recent tweet during the voting phase of the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, Rahul Gandhi posted what appeared to be a screenshot of a page from an online dictionary with an entry for the word “Modilies”. He claimed the word had been recently added to the English language. The Oxford dictionary’s official handle was quick to refute this claim.

Despite the fact that the word was made up, Gandhi’s claim invoked what is generally perceived as the arbiter of proper, correct English usage in India: the Oxford English Dictionary. The logic was that the inclusion of a word within its hallowed pages could breathe life even into an otherwise unrecognised word.

By claiming that the word was in the dictionary, Gandhi was appealing to the faith Indians have in the power of the book. However, this faith needs deeper examination.

A bundle of contradictions

The use of Indian English in India is complex, made more confusing by a perplexing, heady mix of closely intertwined contradictions. Its character is unabashedly Indian but it cannot be separated from literary and linguistic currents in the West. It is one of India’s most conspicuously visible languages but is only spoken by a small minority.

On the one hand, Indian English speakers and writers often express pride in its fluid vocabulary and how it draws freely from various Indian languages. However, many also look askance at its uniquely South Asian patterns of pronunciation, with linguistic influences from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages (many of them shared across the country).

Most importantly, while millions of Indians speak Indian English, most only speak it as an additional language. The popular claim, in elite circles at least, that English is now a truly Indian language must be tempered by the awareness that only a small number of people speak it.

According to the 2011 Census, 259,678 Indians returned their mother tongue as English, the bulk of whom are likely Anglo-Indians. This is probably a lower estimate since ‘mother tongue’ traditionally refers to an ethnic language in the Indian context, regardless of whether or not one actually speaks it. The number of Indians who speak English as a second or third language is in the tens of millions according to the same data, but with no indication of competency levels.

As such, it is no surprise that speakers – even fluent ones – have to actively work to adhere to a normative standard. Dictionaries offline and online, especially the latter, help these Indians adopt a more standard vocabulary and understand words that they not likely to encounter in India.

And for those Indians whose grasp of English is weaker, these same sources grow and become more important as they offer a way to bridge the larger gap in their vocabulary comprehension. They can look up numerous words in the written language, which they don’t understand, quite painlessly. This includes large terms like ‘optimisation’, ‘affluence’ and ‘trifecta’ as well as region-specific entities, such as ‘fossicking’ or ‘sasquatch’.

At the same time, we can’t discount the effect of colonialism, since educational infrastructure installed by the British has been hardcoded with English privilege.

So it is no wonder that the dictionary holds such an exalted status as a source for lexical legitimacy in India.

Dictionaries describe language

It is very important to remember that dictionaries are not designed to define the use of language. Instead, they are supposed to record it. In other words, dictionaries are descriptive works, not prescriptive.

The store of words available in all spoken languages is constantly evolving. One aspect of this constant change is how a language can take in, coin or even repurpose words to describe new concepts that its speakers are exposed to. It is such a core feature of language, an intrinsic part of how humans interact with the way they speak, that it just happens organically and without conscious effort on the speaker’s part. Lexical bodies then record these words and define them as the people use them.

For example, a word that ends up used by speakers to the point where its meaning is apparent through familiarity has already entered their vocabulary. A dictionary would then need to define this word so as to record it, and allow the speakers to look it up for reference.

Ultimately, a word becomes legitimate – as Indian English speakers seem to desire – when it enters popular use.

The vocabulary in different versions of a language can end up evolving differently as a result of cultural, political, historical forces, as with American and British English, for example. Indian English is susceptible to similar forces, with the distinction of how its speakers inhabit a primarily Indian-language-speaking milieu and generally come from Indian-language-speaking backgrounds themselves.

So, why should an Indian English speaker look to the West to validate her variant of English when the vitality of the Indian English language is in fact its own validation? Approval by a dictionary body far removed from the pulse of a language and discourse can’t be the gold standard in this context.

Indian English speakers will continue to require words to describe their ever-changing political contexts. When they do, they will draw from a variety of sources, including from their own mother tongues. Some of these words will be used widely, eventually entering the realm of established discourse. That’s when you know an Indian English word has “made it”.

None of this is a new phenomenon. Words like ‘hartal’, ‘bandh’, ‘roko’, ‘gherao’ and more are Indian English terms referring to political concepts, all drawn from Indian languages, primarily Hindi.

Recognising linguistic variation

While nobody recommends that we shouldn’t at all rely on dictionaries, it is also important to realise that their contents are not the be-all and end-all of English usage, especially given the linguistic variation and divergence that separate Indian English from its British counterpart.

These points are not contradictory because the very function of a dictionary is to define and record, and the absence of a widely used word in the dictionary only points to a delay in having the word recorded and added. It does not indicate that the word in question is invalid.

Meanwhile, our distinctly Indian brand of English continues to grow, with both its spoken and written forms driving its evolution. If dictionary bodies intend to stay relevant in the country, they will need to keep up and record its growing vocabulary.

Karthik Malli is a Bangalore-based communications professional with a keen interest in linguistics, history and travel. He tweets on Indian languages @TianChengWen.