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Subject name: Linguistics

Paper name: Introduction to Linguistics

Principle Investigator Prof. Pramod Pandey Centre for Linguistics, SLL&CS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New 110067 Phone: 011-26704226 (O), M- 9810979446 Email: [email protected]

Paper Coordinator Prof. RaghavachariAmritavalli Professor, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad – 500 007 [email protected] +91-40-27097512, 9490148757 Module Id Lings_P1_M13

Module name Societal and individual multilingualism

Content Writer Prof. RaghavachariAmritavalli Email id [email protected] Phone +91-40-27097512, 9490148757

Content Reviewer Prof. Aditi Mukherjee Professor (Retd), Department of Linguistics, Osmania University, Hyderabad 500007

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Module 13 Societal and individual multilingualism

Objectives To characterize the linguistic diversity of and consequent multilingualism; overview of census data about language; to introduce code switching and code mixing through bilingual humour

Keywords Language families; bilingualism; trilingualism; bilingual humour and creativity

Outline

I. Introduction II. The language situation in India 2.1 How many languages are there in India? 2.2. A country of continental proportions

III. Societal multilingualism IV. Individual multilingualism 4.1 Samples of Multilingual humour

V. Summary VI. Questions and Supporting Materials / Learn More

I. Introduction

Linguistic theory, we have seen, idealizes and abstracts away from social and political realities, in its attempt to characterize the nature of our knowledge of language. Yet it seems even more urgent to understand what the nature of our mental knowledge is, when we consider that in many countries, people naturally speak and learn more than one language. Multilingualism can be approached psychologically (how are the different languages represented in the mind/ brain? Do they interact or interfere with one another?); politically, in

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terms of policy-making (which language or languages should be the language of education, law, and administration or government?); or socially (how do the languages and language groups interact in communication in society?). In this unit we will take a preliminary look at the picture of multilingualism in India, and how people use their linguistic repertoire in communication.

II. The language situation in India

Let us begin with a simple question: how many languages are there in India? The answer to this question turns out to be surprisingly complex. Perhaps it will help to briefly look into the history of our linguistic heritage.

Languages from four language families are represented in India. The largest group of languages spoken in India today are the Indo-Aryan languages. This is a sub-group of Indo- European. Around the year 1500 BC, tribes whose language was proto- (a language that gave rise to what we call Sanskrit today) are believed to have come into India. Over time, this gave rise to many of the languages currently spoken in the north and central parts of India, including Assamese, Bangla (Bengali), Gujarati, -, Kashmiri, Konkani, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi and Sindhi.

Before this, however, there was already a population present on the subcontinent who were speakers of a different language type, now identified as “Dravidian.” Today, the Dravidian languages comprise the second largest language family in India, and are mainly represented in the south: they include , , Tamil and Telugu. Yet even today, a Dravidian language called Brahui is found in present-day Pakistan, and another called Kurux in the Himalayan foothills, suggesting a southward migration of the people.

In addition, there are languages in India now classified as Tibeto-Burman, such as Meithei (Manipuri), Lushai (Mizo), and the Naga languages; as well as Austro-Asiatic languages, for example the Munda languages of the forest and hill tribes of central and eastern India. The Austro-Asiatic group of languages, though currently small in comparison to the present size of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, may well have been the type of language spoken by the very earliest inhabitants of India, according to anthropologists.

Languages from four large language families are consequently represented in India today.

2.1 How many languages are there in India?

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.- Malinowsky

The answer to this question depends on how you decide to count something as a language. This is not only a question of military or political power, as the quotation above says. Language is tied up with identity. So people may emphasize their linguistic differences. (The most recent example is the claim that Telengana Telugu is different from Andhra Telugu; an earlier example is of the divide between Hindi and Urdu, which is bridged by Hindustani.) Or they may treat the differences as merely dialectal (for example, the northern and southern

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varieties of Kannada, or the “literary” and “spoken” varieties of Tamil). In China, various mutually unintelligible “dialects,” which may elsewhere be considered separate languages, are considered to be varieties of Chinese (such as Mandarin and Cantonese). In India, there are arguments and societal forces that emphasize linguistic plurality and diversity, as well as those that emphasize a commonality of heritage, and a resulting unity. Those who defend the linguistic rights of minorities emphasize that languages with a small number of speakers should also be counted, and criticise the grouping together of different “dialects” under a major language. Others – Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru among them – have sought to dispel the impression of a country filled with countless tribes all speaking different languages, which can never be unified into one nation:

The oft-repeated story of India having five hundred or more languages is a fiction of the mind of the philologist and the Census Commissioner who note down every variation in dialect and every petty hill tongue…as a separate language, although sometimes it is spoken only by a few hundred or a few thousand persons. (Nehru (1946), in Krishna 1991:12)

Indeed, the 1961 Census recorded 1,652 mother tongues in India. However, more than a quarter of these had only four or five speakers each. Around 200 mother tongues had populations of 10,000 speakers or more, and this has subsequently become a criterion for recording a language in the Census. The 1991 Census of India records 114 such languages, out of an estimated total of 400 (Vijayanunni 1999).

The Eighth Schedule of the , which originally mentioned 14 languages, now mentions 22. According to the 1991 Census of India, their speakers account for 96.29% of the population.

Self study Try to find out which languages are mentioned in the Eighth Schedule. Which ones were added recently?

2.2. A country of continental proportions

An interesting parallel has recently begun to be made between India and Europe. Both King (1994) and Malhotra (1998) point out that India is approximately the size of western Europe. The number of officially recognised languages in India is similar to the number of major languages spoken within the area of western Europe:

To those only casually acquainted with her, modern India must seem a veritable jungle of languages, and authoritative sources reinforce this impression. The massive Linguistic Survey of India listed 179 languages, the 1921 Census of India showed 188, and the distinguished Indian linguist, S.K. Chatterjee rounded the figure off to 180. If one looks more closely, however, these apparently overwhelming numbers shrink to manageable proportions. … The four major languages of the Dravidian language family … along with the eight major languages of the Indo-European family … accounted for 93% of the 1981

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population of India. From this perspective India’s linguistic diversity seems not particularly remarkable for a continent-sized nation; Europe west of Russia, roughly comparable in size and population, includes more than twenty different nations using more than twenty major languages. (King 1994:4-5)

III. Societal multilingualism

The pervasive multilingualism of India, and the potential irrelevance of simple categories such as ‘mother tongue,’ have been pointed out many times and by many people. U. R. Ananthamurty (2000: 38) makes the interesting observation that ‘in India, the more literate one is, the fewer languages one knows.’ The common people take multilinguality for granted.

The 1991 Census of India provides some figures about societal multilingualism (Vijayanunni 1999). Khubchandani (1994) discusses the limitations as well as the importance of census data. Nevertheless, the census figures show that the national average for bilingualism has steadily climbed: from 9.7% (1961), through 13.04% (1971) and 13.34% (1981), to 19.44% in 1991.

There are significant differences between language groups within India with respect to ‘their willingness or compulsion to learn other languages and the extent of interaction with other communities through language’ (Vijayanunni 1999). Three out of four Konkani speakers, two out of three Sindhi speakers, and one out of three Nepali, Urdu or Punjabi speakers are bilingual. These language groups have a proportion of bilinguals well above the national average. At the other end of the spectrum, Hindi, Bengali and Oriya are the only three languages with bilingual percentages below the all-India figure. Among the four main south Indian languages, more speakers of Malayalam are bilingual than those of Kannada, Telugu, or Tamil, in that order.

Some reasons for this variation are quite apparent. Languages like Konkani and Sindhi are numerically small. Their speakers are minorities distributed across states with other scheduled languages as official languages. They have to be bilingual to survive and compete economically (usually in the regional language which is the language of their outgroup). Significantly, Konkanis and Sindhis also turn out to be the most trilingual populations. Correspondingly, “big” languages such as Tamil, Hindi and Bengali are below the national average for trilingualism (7.26%). Hindi and Bengali are also below that average for bilingualism, and Tamil has the least bilinguals among the four major south Indian languages. Among the larger language groups there is clearly less pressure to know other languages, as in many parts of the world.

What language are Indian bilinguals bilingual in?Some language groups show conformity to the three language formula: first, bilinguality in Hindi; and second, trilinguality in English. This is true for Sindhi (and Marathi and Gujarati): two thirds of Sindhi bilinguals claim Hindi as the second language; about a fifth claim English as a third language. This pattern is, however, reversed in southern India. Malayalam has 28.85 % bilinguals, and three out of four bilingual Malayalis claim English as their second language. Tamil has a lower

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proportion of bilinguals (18.74%), but again many are English bilinguals - two out of every three.

Vijayanunni (1999) points out that more Malayalis know Hindi than do Oriyas, although Hindi is a geographically neighbouring language for Oriyas, and the total populations of Oriyas and Malayalis are comparable. A possible inference is that more speakers of Malayalam are distributed outside their own state, and they feel the need for Hindi as a link language. Overall, English is clearly ahead of Hindi in the bilingual scenario in India. Hindi is returned as a second or third language by 70 million of the 807 million speakers of scheduled languages (which works out to 8.67%). English is returned by 90 million people, or 11.15% of the speakers of scheduled languages; 8% report it as a second, and 3.15% as a third, language. This continues a trend noted by Khubchandani (1994:19) of the consolidation of English during the decade 1961-71, when English bilinguals increased from 26% to 35% of the bilingual population; Hindi-Urdu gained only 1% in the same period. The current figure stands at 57.3% English bilinguals as a percentage of bilinguals.

We have spoken at some length about the findings of the 1991 census. However, we must note that not only multilingualism, but the knowledge of multiple scripts for a language, has been a tradition in India. The question of the relation of a language to a script is a larger issue that we do not address in this unit. We note only that languages like Sanskrit and Konkani written in the same script as the main language of that area. Moreover, books in Hindi/ Urdu/ Hindustani were published in both Urdu and the Nagari scripts. Today, with the fading away of this biscriptal tradition in publishing, a reader who understands Hindustani but knows only the Nagari script is forced to read literary works in Urdu – for example, the stories of the Pakisani writer Intizar Husein – in their English translation.

Here is a recent report in , Tuesday, August 25, 2015, about “a 105 year- old Urdu copy” of a literary and culturally significant text,a version of a Hindu epic authored by Tulsidas, printed in Lahore in 1910. The fact that this find is reported in the newspapers is a pointer that the tradition of printing a “Hindi” text in the Urdu script has not been continued in our society today. Similarly, erstwhile subjects of the current newly-formed state of Telengana were familiar with the Persian as well as Roman and Nagari scripts, but this is no longer the case.

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IV. Individual multilingualism

A remarkable ability of multilinguals is that the proficient multilingual can use just any one of his or her languages while speaking, without letting the other languages “interfere” while s/he speaks. Psychologists have spoken of a “switch” that turns off the languages a multilingual speaker chooses not to use. An even more remarkable ability of multilinguals is that they can choose to use more than one language of their choice, depending on the situation: who they are speaking to, the level of formality, and so on. This is known as code switching.

There is a vast literature on code-switching and code-mixing: what its grammar is, what its conditions of use are, and what its communicative functions might be. In this unit we will describe a use of code mixing and switching to create bilingual humour, which can be appreciated only by other speakers who are bilingual in the same languages. This is testimony to the bi/multilingual speaker’s creativity. The jokes are annotated to show the complexity of their cultural references and language structuring.

IV.1 Samples of Multilingual humour

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These are just a few samples. If you listen to people freely talk and joke with each other in two languages, you will probably collect many more examples. The first, extended example is from school children.

1) Question: What is the name of Bruce Lee’s thumb?

Answer: ungli. [Hindi: finger]

Question: … of Bruce Lee’s favourite vegetable?

Answer: muuli [Hindi: radish]

Question: … of Bruce Lee’s gardener?

Answer: maali [Hindi: gardener]

…

2) Question: What did one banana say to another?

Answer: Akeela huun main. [Hindi: I’m alone/ lonely; I’m a banana.]

This is a three way pun between English and Hindi: keela/ banana, “a keela,” akeela. Notice the cultural reference: this is a joke about dating, such as:

Question: What did the leaning tower of Pisa say to Big Ben? “If you have the time, I have the inclination.”

3) Question: What did one brinjal say to another?

Answer: Let baigans be baigans. [bygones= Hindi baigans= brinjals] Notice the reference to the English saying “Let bygones be bygones.”

4) Question: What did one pea in the pod say to another?

Answer: Mutter, mutter. [mutter= Hindi mattar= peas]. To mutter in English is to say something.

5) Question: Why did the Tamilian cow eat the door?

Answer: Because it had the word ‘pull’ written on it. [ pull means grass in Tamil.]

6) Question: When would Mickey Mouse write the Ramayana?

Answer:When he was a ‘Valmiki’. [When you stick him up on a wall as a poster.]

The cultural reference or pun is between the author of the Ramayana and Mickey Mouse. The bilingual pun here spans two cultures.

7) Question: What did the amoeba tell the chai wallah? Answer: ‘suda poddiya.’

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[‘Suda’ means ‘hot.’ ‘Sudapoddiya’ is ‘Please make it hot.’As of course we know, amoeba have pseudopodia.]

A joke creates a shared community. Many of these jokes are extended puns along two languages. They create a community of people who know both these languages, and can draw upon on two aspects of their personalities, to understand them.These jokes come from people who have been educated in English and who are also very comfortable in their own languages.

V. Summary

Languages from four language families are represented in India, creating what linguists call “a linguistic area.” The speakers of these languages interact with one another; they become naturally bilingual or multilingual, and their languages begin to influence one another. This results in code mixing and code switching. A creative use of the bilingual’s repertoire is in the invention of bilingual jokes. These jokes are quite linguistically and culturally complex, and involve communities of multilingual speakers.

VI. Questions and Supporting Materials / Learn More

Discuss with your friends: Do you think it is wrong to code-switch and code-mix? Do you code-switch and code-mix? Why? When?

Collect examples of multilingualism from television, newpapers and advertisements.

Answer to self study question These languages are popularly called “regional” languages, but this is a problematic term. The Census uses the neutral term “scheduled languages.” The are: Assamese, Bangla (Bengali), Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Urdu (all Indo-Aryan); Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu (all Dravidian). To this list have been added Sindhi, Konkani, Nepali (Indo-Aryan), Manipuri (Tibeto-Burman), and more recently, Bodo, Dogri, Santali and Maithili.

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