e-Content Submission to INFLIBNET Subject name: Linguistics Paper name: Introduction to Linguistics Principle Investigator Prof. Pramod Pandey Centre for Linguistics, SLL&CS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 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 1 Module 13 Societal and individual multilingualism Objectives To characterize the linguistic diversity of India 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 2 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-Sanskrit (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, Hindi-Urdu, 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 Kannada, Malayalam, 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 3 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 Constitution of India, 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 4 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