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JOURNEY OF INDIA THROUGH LANGUAGE / Prof. E. Annamalai
ABSTRACT
India has been a home of many languages form the earliest times. The languages make a network functional relations in a country, which reflect the social and political relationship between the communities speaking them. A history of the functional relations between languages will therefore give a glimpse of the history of socio-political relationship between communities. This talk is a historical sketch of such relationship between the languages of India.
The talk will describe the genetic relationship of the languages and their cousins outside India; the nature of Sanskrit, its social role and its relation with the other languages including the language of the Indus civilization and other religions viz., Buddhism and Jainism, the spread of Sanskrit (and Tamil later) to the South East Asian countries; the claim of linguistic autonomy and the birth of new languages in the medireview period, and the social milieu that made it happen; the response of the Dravidian languages to Sanskrit; the rise of Persian challenging the preeminence of Sanskrit; the interaction of Austro-Asiatic languages with the Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian languages, and the isolation of Sino-Tibetan languages in the cultural periphery.
In the modern period, the talk will point out the impact of the European languages on Indian languages and the social role of English in comparison with that of Sanskrit in the past and the rise of English to dominance; the socio-political basis of the controversy between Hindustani, Urdu and Hindi; the socio-economic motivations for opposition to Hindi; the sociolinguistic consequences of redrawing the boundaries of the states to coincide with language boundaries. The talk will end with an analysis of the contemporary political conflicts through the prism of language. If the time is used up by the description of languages in the past, the talk will end before the modern period.
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BIODATA for Dr. Annamalai:
Prof. E. Annamalai studied linguistics in India and U.S.A., where he did his doctoral work in Chomskyan linguistics. After teaching at the University of Chicago, he returned to India as professor at the Central Institute of Indian Languages of Govt. of India in Mysore. He was in charge, among other things, of tribal language education and development in this research and training institute that deals with use of language in education and society. He subsequently became its director and advised governments, in that capacity, on language policy. Since his recent retirement, he has been a researcher and consultant in India and abroad on language issues in education and on multilingualism. Currently, he is a member of the Council for the Promotion of Indian Languages headed by the Prime Minister of India and a member of the Scientific Committee of UNESCO's World Language Survey.
Date: 06/29/2002
Location: MIT Room 4-231
Time: 4:00 pm
Contact: P. E. Narasimhan 781.270.9436
Directions: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?locate=bldg_4
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