Man
and language are coterminous concepts. Each necessitates the other for its existence,
survival and development. From the axis of language, man is defined as 'speech
creature', homo-loquens', or 'an animal who talks'. Looking from the stand-point
of man, language is viewed as primordial mode and model for human cognition and
communication. The centrality of intra-organic cognition and the vitality of inter-organic
communication converge in man to transform his biological entity into socio-cultural
existence. Man does not live by himself alone nor does his cognitive growth free
from inter-organic facets of life. Man is thus, simultaneously both-a person and
a persona, a biological entity into socio-cultural reality and an organism that
controlls the behaviour of some other organism and object and in the process gets
shaped by them. In short, man is a sign-production.
This relationship between man and language on the one hand and language and society
on the other hand has been the central concern for a section of scholars. Such
scholars tried to examine what kind of role a language plays in transforming the
'natural' (biological) being of - human existence into the 'cultural' being of
human existence. They also tried to explore the functionality of a language in
forming a nexus between man's identity as a 'self and his 'social identity'. In
work of such scholars the 'form' of a language is transcended by the concept of
'function', linguistic rules by communicative roles, and sign-relations of various
kinds by signification processes.
Professor Pattanayak's work in the past and in this collection of papers particularly,
emphasizes the vitality and relevance of such an approach. Not only do these articles
explicate the relationship between language man, society and culture but also
call for a new perspective required to explain the multilingual and pluricultural
reality of the Third World Countries. Not only he goes deep in analysing the fundamental
difference between the ethos of multilingualism. Characteristics of the developing
countries of the Third World and the ethos of dominant monolingualism characterizing
the developed world, but also implicitily suggests that the scholars of the Third
World should develop their own theory of language and their own perspective of
linguistics as a dicipline. His writings are suggestive of the fact that 'science',
specifically 'human sciences', is not free of 'ideology'. Linguistics is also
an ideology-impregnated discipline and, hence, scholars working in the area of
science of language should develop the discipline in form of 'critical linguistics'.
Critical Linguistics builds the perspective the study of languagefrom within.
it is centred around the ethos that comes into being from within the core of reality.
It rejects the process of theory-building that is situation-neutral or derivative
of some other theories or super-imposed from above. For example, most of the current
theories concerning the relationship between language and society are based on
the experience drawn from the dominant monolingual situation. Consequently, their
'constructs' do not capture the verbal reality of our multilingual situation.
Even such basic notions like 'dialect', 'standard','mothertongue' etc., as defined
in standard textbooks of linguistics, are unable to find their operational significance
and applicational relevance in our real verbal situation. We find more residues
than configurations. I am confident that scholars with Professor Pattanayak the
responsibility of making their discipline 'critical' and 'true' to their own reality