Language in South Asia (review)

South Asia, as defined in the introduction to this volume, comprises seven countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives. As the summary in the front matter claims, 'South Asia is a rich and fascinating linguistic area, its many hundreds of languages from four major language families representing the distinctions of caste, class, profession, religion and region'. Appropriately, the book is extensive, containing twenty-six chapters by twenty-seven authors. In addition, the introduction by Braj B. Kachru includes an extensive annotated bibliography on Englishization, substantial enough to have been a single chapter.

The volume itself is divided into ten parts: Part 1, 'Language history, families, and typology'; Part 2, 'Languages and their functions'; Part 3, 'Sanskrit and traditions of language studies'; Part 4, 'Multilingualism, contact, and convergence'; Part 5, 'Orality, literacy, and writing systems'; Part 6, 'Language conflicts'; Part 7, 'Language and modernization'; Part 8, 'Language and discourse'; Part 9, 'Language and identity'; and Part 10, 'Languages in diaspora'.

The authors are all recognized and productive scholars in South Asian languages, and the information in the individual chapters, with minor exceptions, can be taken as authoritative. The quality of the chapters is generally high, and all pertain to the main topic. The size of the book and the multiplicity of contributions and authors preclude treating it any detail here, so that only a few can be singled out for discussion.

The terminology by which South Asian languages are designated in administrative or political terms can be puzzling and even misleading to the outsider. For example, as the relevant chapter notes, 'tribe' in India is 'an administrative and judicial construct' (153), applied in a schedule in the Constitution to some relatively isolated sections of the population. Though they constitute 623 communities, less than half of them speak what could on other grounds be considered a tribal mother tongue. Designations such as national, official, minority, regional, link, and tribal, commonly enshrined in post-independence constitutions, vary from country to country, and have bearing on the status, rights, and opportunities of the groups to which they pertain. Several chapters do much to clarify this situation, or at least make clear the difficulties and complexities.

A common question is how many languages are spoken in the area, especially in India, but even apart from the classic problem of defining language and dialect, sources vary widely. As E. Annamalai states in 'Contexts of multilingualism' (Ch. 10, 223–34): '[The number of languages] varies from census to census because of political and administrative decisions on the criteria for the inclusion of languages based on the number of speakers and the criteria for the classification of mother tongues into languages' (224).

R. E. Asher's chapter, 'Language in historical context' (Ch. 1, 31–48), surveys the languages and families of the area and is understandably tightly packed with information. There are two chapters on individual languages, but Yamuna Kachru's 'Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani' (Ch. 3, 81–102) is the only one that gives structural information in any detail. Though admirable in coverage and approach, its lack of glosses for the syntactic examples makes them less accessible for the nonspecialist. 'Persian in South Asia', by S. A. H. Abidi and Ravinder Gargesh (Ch. 4, 103–20), presents the history and bidirectional interaction of Persian with local languages in South Asia—a topic that might otherwise be overlooked.

Two chapters dealing with Sanskrit nicely complement each other. In Ch. 8, 'Sanskrit in the South Asian sociolinguistic context' (177–88), Madhav M. Deshpande relates the history of Sanskrit to society and culture. Ch. 9, 'Traditions of language study in South Asia' (189–220) by Ashok Aklujkar, is largely devoted to Pāṇini's grammar, offering a clear, accessible, and admiring account of his theoretical constructs and their application. Given the great contribution of this tradition to modern western linguistics, these chapters are welcome inclusions.

Aside from Ch...