Explorations in Indian Sociolinguistics

Contents: Introduction. 1. The autonomy of phonological variables: Schwa deletion in Hindi and other objects of wonder/Rajendra Singh and Alan Ford. 2. The autonomy of social variables: the Indian evidence revisited/Rajendra Singh and Jayant K. Lele. 3. Modern Hindustani and formal and social aspects of language contact/Rajendra Singh. 4. Communication in a multilingual society: some missed opportunities/Rajendra Singh, Jayant K. Lele and Gita Martohardjono. 5. Language, power and cross-sex communication strategies in Hindi and Indian English revisited/Rajendra Singh and Jayant K. Lele. 6. We, they and us: a note on code-switching and stratification in North India/Rajendra Singh. 7. On the sociolinguistics of English in India/Probal Dasgupta. 8. Sanskrit and Indian English: some linguistic considerations/Probal Dasgupta. 9. The image of Sanskrit: structuralism and its Brahminical antecedents/Probal Dasgupta. 10. Review of Gumperz, language and social identity/Rajendra Singh and Gita Martohardjono. 11. Review of Bhatia, a history of the Hindi grammatical tradition/Rajendra Singh. Bibliography. Notes on contributors. Language index. Author index.

"This book is the second volume in the series Language and Development, a series which focuses on the theoretical and empirical work related to the sociolinguistic experience of South Asian countries since they achieved independence, while not ignoring other newly emerging states. The series highlights questions of language, culture, literature and identity in the context of development or modernization.

"This volume pushes sociolinguistics to the point of crisis in that it refuses to play the game of correlating unexamined language surfaces with unexamined social appearances, and uses the rich Indian material to explore this crisis. The contributors provide an extended critique of the body or correlation paradigm research which most accept as sociolinguistics. They argue that all serious work in both linguistics and sociology demands that certain critical standards be met and that what normally passes for sociolinguistics does not meet the critical standards of either discipline. The general tenor of the contributions is that sociology is all about not taking social appearances for granted, while linguistics is concerned with looking at the underlying processes that 'make language tick'. It should follow, then, that a critical sociolinguistics would build on the state-of-the-art in both disciplines.

"The contributors contend that the focus of a critical re-examination in linguistics and sociology should be the native speaker of a language. It is the native speaker's struggle to regain his/her sovereign right to conceive of language in critical and rational terms that provides a 'psychologically real' context for any scholarly effort at re-examination.

"Taken as a whole, this volume provides an original theory by viewing both linguistics and sociology as studies of norms and as crucially supplementing each other's ideas of how humans, who live by these norms, keep contesting them. It will be of interest to those in the fields of linguistics, sociology, sociolinguistics, generative grammer, language, and literature and society." (jacket)

[Rajendra Singh is Professor of Linguistics at the Universite de Montreal. He also wrote Explorations in Interlanguage and Language and Society.]