Abstract
Certain concerns pertaining to documentation of endangered, minoritized and the lesser known languages are evocative of doubts and interventions by the participating audience reflective of a social condition, which marked a contraction of our zone of sensitivity, verging on derision and suspicion. It resonates with the “cynical opening” of the story concerning the “bandwagon syndrome.”
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Notes
- 1.
This paper is based on an invited presentation in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IITM, Chennai; the participating audience comprised young faculty members and research scholars of languages and linguistics from different universities and institutes.
- 2.
Paden (1987) clarifies the obscurity associated with ‘Man’. According to him, Foucault does not mean ‘man’ as human kind; “rather a particular view of human cognitive processes which takes them to be open to a kind of empirical investigation which can both provide a ground for knowledge and explain behavior.” (Paden 1987, p. 123).
- 3.
We are grateful to Awadesh K. Mishra for providing this revealing information.
- 4.
Spolsky (1998, p. 24) in his explanation of speech community informs us that unlike the general linguists who look at it as “all the people who speak a single language (like English or French or Amharic) and so share notions of what is same or different in phonology or grammar…sociolinguists…focus on the language practices of a group of people who…share not just a single language but a repertoire of languages or varieties.
- 5.
As an ideological state apparatus, Census is used by the state to pigeon-hole the people within their boundaries into categories—linguistic, racial, and ethnic for conferring group recognition and (numerical) proportion. For instance, 2011 Census rationalised 19,569 raw returns, which were based on the parameters of mutual intelligibility and linguistic relatedness. This resulted in reporting 1369 as rationalised mother tongues and 1474 as ‘Unclassified’ ‘Other’ mother tongues; thus, leaving behind 16,726 raw returns. Out of 1369 rationalised mother tongues, 121 were classified mother tongues, returned by 10,000 or more speakers, without providing any objective basis for arriving at this particular number (121), and not recognising the rest of them even when their speakers were much more than 10,000. The driving force for rationalisation, i.e. mutual intelligibility and linguistic relatedness, is neither able to explain the inclusion of 49 varieties of Hindi in 2001 Census and 56 in 2011 Census nor it is able to justify kee** Urdu separate from Hindi. (forthcoming publication, Hasnain, Kumar, Mir and Khan).
- 6.
1951 Census classified all MTs as “language/dialect” or “languages (or dialects)”. Out of 767 languages, “there were 47 languages (or dialects) spoken by more than 1 lakh persons (23 tribal languages/dialects and 24 non-tribal languages/dialects), and 720 languages/dialects spoken by fewer than 1 lakh speakers (202 languages/dialects spoken by fewer than 10 persons)” (Mishra 2019, p. 2).
- 7.
Regarding language shift it was observed that though a small group of Birhor families were taught Bible in Odia language in Noamundi area lying on Jharkhand-Odisha border, nonetheless the community had not converted to Christianity. The Bible written in Odia language was translated (verbally) to them in Birhor.
- 8.
Chinals are identified by different names such as Domba, Channa, Shudras. These names carry pejorative connotations, suggestive of belonging to lower caste, and the community members claim that these are attributed to them by the upper caste Hindus. Majority of them do not want to be identified with this name and, thus use different surnames to disguise their Chinali connection. There are few who have no objection in being called as Chinals. However, none of them believe that they are Shudras; rather they claim that they belong to the Aryan race of Indians and some even carry the surname Arya for the validation their Aryan ancestry (Mir, 2015).
- 9.
Although some families living in Kullu consider Chinali as their mother tongue and pass it on to their children, it’s use is confined to home and rarely used in speaking with other community members.
- 10.
Scope of lexicons used to explore the counterparts can be expanded to include pronouns, tense forms, as well, for participating in situated speech events. In fact, tenses are of particular significance because they help in eliciting information on the temporal relationship to the event in question either by embedding target sentences in the questionnaire on tenses in a context or by reversing the order and asking speakers for a context in which a certain expressions are likely to be used by them.
- 11.
Recipies also allude to intersectionality of gender and allows us to understand the synergetic and mutually reinforcing connection between linguistic vitality and the gendered intent of the questions employed by a researcher in the fieldwork. Pioneering studies by Abbi convincingly demonstrate that women have been more consistent in contributing towards linguistic vitality. This not only validates the prevalence of gender-loaded questions concerning linguistic vitality but also suggests that documentation of language must be looked at from the lenses of mother and grandmother.
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Acknowledgements
We have benefitted from our discussion with Professors Anvita Abbi, Panchanan Mohanty and Awadesh K. Mishra and the insightful comments provided by Mr. Danish Iqbal.
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Hasnain, S.I., Mir, F.A. (2023). Language Documentation: Issues and Challenges of Field-Worker. In: Kumar, R., Prakash, O. (eds) Language Studies in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5276-0_18
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