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It seems that historically there has been a disjunction between the study
of language and society. Language is so central to human endeavours that
it must have played a major role in every social enterprise - be it a revolution
or revolt, colonization or world war. Though it is a matter of several years
of research, I assume that language must have played a significant role
in the Industrial, French and October revolutions; it must have also been
central to the two world wars. But I am not aware of any sociolinguistic
research that demonstrates this. It is also possible that linguists lived
in ivory towers. In the absence of serious research one can only hazard
a tentative hypothesis: periods of social upheavals must also be periods
of linguistic lulls; conversely, linguistic flowering will be associated
with periods of socio-economic prosperity or peace. Two periods of linguistic
flowering may include (a) 1850-1914 and (b) 1950-2000. In the first, i.e.,
the one from about 1850 to about 1914, you have the work, among others,
of von Humboldt, Grimm, Boas, Meillet and all the early dialectologists
(for details, see Chambers and Trudgill 1980) including Wenker's work in
Germany, Gillieron's Linguistic Atlas of France (LAF) and Grierson's 11
volume Linguistic Survey of India (LSI). In the second period, i.e., the
one starting around 1950s, you of course have the work of Chomsky and his
followers, of Hymes, Gumperz and Labov and of Jakobson, Chafe, Jackendoff,
Kiparsky and Lakoff among others. Among the famous recent dialectologist
you have the work of Kurath (1949, 1972) on the Linguistic Atlas of New
England (LANE) and of Dieth and Orton and their colleagues on the Survey
of English Dialects (SED). In the second period, we can actually say that
linguistic activity has really taken off, diversified fully into the highly
specialized areas of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and computational
linguistics. We now turn to the spells when linguistic activity was slow.
The periods of linguistic lull might include first the period between 1780
- 1840 and second, the period of world wars, i.e., the years between 1914
- 1945. The period 1780 - 1840 is, as you know, called the age of revolution
- the age of the industrial and the French revolution. It is also the age
of great social exploitation and increasing colonization. We don't find
much linguistic work reported from this period. For some mysterious reasons,
linguists, decided to remain quiet at 'social moments', moments when language
was being actively used in social upheaval and I am sure even the language
structure was being significantly influenced. The second period of linguistic
lull is 1914 - 1945 although, as expected during the inter-war years, we
have enormous activity in structural linguistics across the world and across
social sciences - activity pioneered in the work of Sapir (1921) and Bloomfield
(1933). |
Saussure lived during 1857-1913 and his seminal work that marked a shift
from comparative philology to structural principles appeared posthumously
in 1916. Obviously, the fundamental conceptual machinery of structural analysis
in terms of such sharply contrasted pairs as synchrony and dichrony, langue
and parole, signifier and signified, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations,
contrastive and complementary distribution, etc., was formulated before
the First World War. The last century can in fact be legitimately seen in
two halves linguistically both dominated by structuralism, the first half
by Saussurian structuralism that was deeply associated with sociology and
anthropology and the second half with Chomskyan transformational generative
structuralism that was associated with psychology and computation. But the
preoccupation of both the types was to develop self-contained autonomous
systems-- homogeneous, context-free, monolingual and mono-cultural. Even
when sociologists and anthropologists described new, little-known groups
of people, they saw them more as 'objects of wonder' than as underprivileged,
marginalized societies who had been forgotten in what was described as the
advancement of civilization. In their desire to make the unfamiliar familiar
and tangible in widely acknowledged structural frames, linguists and ethnographers
appear to have evaded exactly the kind of questions that should have been
central to their enterprise. |
The second half of the 20th century is closely associated with the death
of the peasantry in Europe, a process that is beginning to gain momentum
in some of the third world countries today. What is happening to the languages
of the peasants, to their multilinguality? Inevitably associated with the
disappearance of the peasant class and the appearance of the industrial
labour class is the call for universal literacy and perhaps for the first
time, an unfortunate distinction is made between education and literacy.
We are familiar with the comparable call for universal literacy in the third
world countries these days. But it is indeed rare that we stop to ask literacy
in which language and how much literacy? The 1960s saw student uprisings
across the world - Paris, Vietnam, USA - and the university cities took
shape. Students from different countries, with different languages and cultures,
talked to each other. The 1960s also brought the question of women centre-stage.
Suddenly, several women were seen in all kinds of professions including
teaching, administration, judiciary, architecture, technology, science,
medicine, etc., which simply underscored the point that for a long time
half the world was kept domesticated. At least a part of woman's low domestic
identity, perhaps a very significant part, was coded linguistically. Women
in the third world countries lived in far more oppressive conditions and
yet paradoxically, most women state heads appeared in the third world: Bandarnaike
(1960) in Sir Lanka, Indira Gandhi (1966) in India, Acquino (1986) in Philippines
and Benazir Bhatto (1988) in Pakistan among others. What role has language
played in the oppression of women? What role does it play in sometimes making
leaders out of them? |
The development of pidgin and creole languages and of mixed codes has
been closely associated with unfair trade, slave trade and indentured labour.
Yet most pidgin and creole studies focus on trying to show how these are
not really languages: they are in some sense simplified and reduced. Even
structurally, it is unfair to compare a nascent language with languages
that have been alive and kicking for centuries. Sociolinguistically these
are missed opportunities. I am sure there is more to pidgins and creoles
and mixed codes than just structural simplification just as there is a lot
more to an advertisement about electrical switches that reads: |
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