Table Of ContentLanguage Variation in South Asia
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Language Variation
in South Asia
WILLIAM BRIGHT
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1990
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
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Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
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Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1990 by William Bright
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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without the prior permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bright, William, 1928-
Language variation in South Asia / by William Bright,
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-19-506365-1
1. Dravidian languages—Variation.
2. South Asia—Languages—Variation.
3. Diglossia (Linguistics) I. Title.
PL4603.B7 1990 494'.8-<tc20
90-31688
Pages xiii-xiv will constitute an extension of the copyright page.
2 4 6 8 9 7 53 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Lise M.enn
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Preface
My introduction to South Asian linguistics, as a student at Berkeley,
was through the teaching of M. B. Emeneau; starting in 1948, he gave
me my start in Sanskrit and in comparative Dravidian. At the same
time, with the added guidance of Mary R. Haas, I was beginning work
on American Indian linguistics; it was in this latter field that my doc-
torate was awarded in 1955. But jobs in linguistics were scarce then,
and with Emeneau's support, I accepted a two-year Rockefeller Foun-
dation fellowship to go to India. My duties there were to teach lin-
guistics courses at Deccan College, Poona, during two short sessions
each year, but otherwise to live in Mysore State (now Karnataka),
working on a descriptive grammar of Kannada. Since only the literary
variety of the language had been previously described, in the grammar
of Spencer (1950), my specific purpose was to prepare an account of
the colloquial language.
At that time I had little appreciation of the linguistic complexity of
South Asia. While still in Berkeley, I had tried to prepare myself by
recording spoken Kannada data from a graduate student of political
science, a native of Mysore City. In the hope of eliciting data from
the vernacular language, I asked him to speak to me as he would 'to
a younger brother', and was only mildly surprised to find that his
language was almost identical with that described by Spencer. In my
innocence, I proceeded to Bangalore, the capital of Mysore State, and
rented a house in the Cantonment area—only to find that my neighbors
were quite ignorant of Kannada: their families had followed the British
army from Madras State during the 19th century, and they spoke Tamil.
Eventually my bicycle took me to the Kannada-speaking area of Ban-
galore, where I enlisted college students to help me learn the lan-
guage. But my problems had not ended: the students taught me utter-
ances like those I had read in Spencer, and had heard from my political
scientist friend in Berkeley, but what I heard spoken on the street
seemed a different language—no more intelligible to me than the Tamil
of the Cantonment.
viii Preface
Eventually I discovered the solution to my problem. My consultants
had been students of the humanities, educated in the belief that literary
Kannada was the REAL language, to the point where they were con-
vinced that it represented their everyday speech. But when I tried
working with students of physical sciences and engineering, they proved
able to give me EITHER literary or colloquial Kannada on request. They
were indeed two different languages, at least on the phonological level.
I had "discovered" diglossia—though I did not properly understand
the phenomenon until, a few years later, I read the classic article on
the subject by Charles Ferguson (1959). I once tried to prove to a
'literary' speaker that he really did use two languages: he swore that
the only way to say "he doesn't do it" was mdduvudilla, but I was
able to confront him with a tape-recording of his own voice saying
madolla to a family member. My victory was hollow, since the man
stopped speaking to me.
On my periodic visits to Poona, I discovered that other linguists
were having similar experiences; it was there I met Charles Ferguson
and John Gumperz, who a few years later were to edit the first collec-
tion of papers on language variation in South Asia (1960). A new area
of socially oriented linguistics seemed to be in the making. After re-
turning to the United States in 1958, I became aware that William
Labov was working on similar lines in regional varieties of American
English (1963, 1964). Conferences on the emerging topic of SOCIOLIN-
GUISTICS were held in 1963 and 1964 (published as Gumperz and Hymes
1964, Bright 1966c), and the field grew steadily from that time on-
ward. By now, it has expanded to the point where few scholars can
any longer claim expertise in the entire field.
After returning to the United States in 1957, I spent a year super-
vising classes in Hindi and Urdu at the State Department language
school in Washington, D.C. After an interim year at Berkeley, I moved
to Los Angeles in 1959, and from then onward worked at UCLA in
the Department of Anthropology and (from 1966) the Department of
Linguistics. There I found myself on a campus which had no orga-
nized program in South Asian studies, and only limited library facili-
ties for the area. For that reason, Indological research took second
place to my work on American Indian linguistics. Nevertheless, I was
able to revisit India in 1967 and 1980, and to work at UCLA over the
years with several students who were native speakers of Indian lan-
guages.
Preface ix
The chapters of the present volume have been adapted from articles
published in various periodicals and collections between 1960 and 1988.
They are presented here in chronological order, partially reflecting di-
rections in which my linguistic interests have shifted over the years.
'Linguistic change in some Indian caste dialects' (1960) was my
first paper in South Asian sociolinguistics, reporting the historical
changes from literary Kannada revealed by two caste dialects of the
spoken language—one used by Brahmins, one by non-Brahmins. 'So-
ciolinguistic variation and language change' (with A. K. Ramanujan
1964), examines comparable changes in Tamil and Tulu, and con-
siders the role of literacy in the historical differentiation of social dia-
lects. 'Dravidian metaphony' (1966) surveys a type of vowel assimila-
tion widely attested in regional and social dialects of South India and
Sri Lanka; attention is also drawn to parallel developments in non-
Dravidian languages of South Asia, pointing to areal diffusion of the
type established by Emeneau 1956, 1980. It may be noted that the
evidence for the diffusion of grammatical structure between Dravidian
and Indo-Aryan (in both directions) led me to reconsider the possible
importance of such a process in historical relationships among the lan-
guage families of North and South America. My work suggested the
following:
(1) For language history in general, structural borrowing can be as-
sociated with an 'accommodative' mode of culture contact, attested
throughout the history of South Asia, whereas constraints on linguistic
borrowing are likely to be associated with a more 'separatist' mode of
contact.
(2) Many researchers in comparative linguistics, especially with re-
gard to Native America, have overemphasized 'family tree' relation-
ships, to the neglect of areal ties.
(3) 'Language mixture' must be recognized as a factor of potential
importance in studying the linguistic prehistory of any part of the world
(Bright 1976, 1984).
Similar views have recently become increasingly accepted in the
field of historical linguistics (see Thomason and Kaufman 1988).
'Language, social stratification, and cognitive orientation' (1966)
examines differences in lexical semantics between caste dialects of
several Dravidian languages, and suggests that the 'semantic iso-
glosses' which separate social groups within a larger speech commu-
nity may correspond to psychological differences between such groups.
