LANGUAGE IN INDIA

THE INFLUENCE OF THE DOMINANT LANGUAGE

Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.

1. MULTILINGUALISM, MULTICULTURALISM, AND
LANGUAGE CHANGE IN INDIA

Multilingualism and multiculturalism are strong points of day-to-day life in India. Multilingualism and multiculturalism establish and encourage inter-dependency among the peoples of India. Linguistic dependency, accompanied by other types of dependency, encourages language change. The linguistic dependency is developed in the contact situations for various reasons. The development of new concepts in one culture, relative numerical strength of the speakers of the languages that are involved in the interaction between communities, the language of education, and the official language policy adopted are some of the factors that contribute to the linguistic dependency among the communities that co-exist in a region. Language change is often set in motion because of linguistic dependency between communities and languages. We notice that such changes affect the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and lexical feature of the languages involved in the interaction and dependency process.

2. CULTIVATED LITERARY LANGUAGE, LINGUISTIC CHANGE, AND IDENTITY

The people do not always approve changes. We see that the innovations are often resented initially. There is fear that the identity of the language may be lost. However, changes become inevitable. The changes that take place in a tribal language that is surrounded by a cultivated literary language are abrupt in some sense because the tribal language may be unwritten or written only recently. If a minority language has a cultivated literary tradition, and the people who use this minority language maintain that cultivated literary tradition along with their own script system, the changes that might take place in the minority languages may not be drastic or widespread. Bright (1976) wrote, “…literacy whenever it is present in human societies acts as a brake on processes of linguistic change.”

While writing on the language of the Kadars, a preliterate community of the Western Ghats, Thyndyil (1975) offered some empirical evidence to show that the minority tribal groups may be forced to change by the surrounding dominant majority with a cultivated literary language. He reported that the Kadars as a whole were slowly becoming Tamilized or Malayalamized due to the spread of literacy and education. In other words, the non-availability of orthographic representation or language formalization in their speech forms, forces the Kadars to lose their language through the process of drastic and abrupt language change.

3. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY CHANGES

Using Sturtevant’s terminology (Sturtevant 1917), this kind of change caused by the impact of the dominant language on a tribal language may be called a Primary Change. The spread of the innovations that are caused by the primary change may be called the Secondary Change. Dialect mixture, development of the new concepts, and the influence of the dominant language and culture are the three major sources for the changes that are initiated.

4. SUBSTANTIVE AND NON-SUBSTANTIVE CHANGES

Rao (1989) looks at these changes as substantive and non-stabstantive. The substantive or strong changes,

include phenomena like phonemic splits, class shifts, innovation and loss of phonemes, and weak or non-substantive such as phonotactical changes like metathesis, distributional rise or fall of allophones, analogical changes, learned loans and spelling pronunciations, changes due to contiguous phonetic space.

Rao declares,

Literary languages are least susceptible for the first kind of change while both literary and non-literary languages are vulnerable for the second kind.

5. URALI IN TAMILNADU

Urali is a Dravidian tribal speech variety spoken in the Sathyamangalam Taluk of the Periyar district in Tamilnadu. The hamlets occupied by this ethnic community are situated in the hill tracts bordering Karnataka and Tamilnadu at an altitude of 1105 meters above the mean sea level. The dominant language of the area is Tamil. Tamil is extensively used for all purposes, including official communications and education. Hence everyone living in this area need to know Tamil if they want to have any interaction with the outside their ethnic group. In recent times, Tamil has become more mandatory because of the stringent forest rules set by the government of Tamilnadu. The basic life pattern of the tribes in this region has been drastically changed from one of dependency on the forest produce to dependency on handouts from the government, etc. Forest produce collection, incipient agriculture, and pastoral work are now being replaced by jobs as cooli laborers in the land or shops owned by the non-tribals living in the area.

6. INCREASING INTERACTIONS

The Uralis now have frequent verbal and other material interaction with the non-Uralis, especially the Tamils living in the region. The impact of this contact is reflected not only in their culture but also in their language. In this sociolinguistic setting, it is the Urali speech that is heavily impacted by the Tamil speech around them. One such language specific feature observed in the speech form of the Uralis is the development of the series of centralized vowels in the phonemic system of the Urali speech.

7. PHONOLOGICAL CHANGES

In Urali there 36 segmental phonemes. Of these 16 are vowels, and the remaining 20 are consonants. The vowel phonemes of Urali may be classified into two types, namely, non-centralized vowel series and centralized vowel series.

In the first type, there are 5 non-centralized vowel phonemes: /a, e, i, o, u/, and their long counterparts: /a:, e:, i:, o:, u:/. In the second type, there are only three centralized vowels corresponding to the non-centralized /a, e, u/, that is, /ä, ë, ü/ as phonemes and their corresponding long counterparts.

The vowel system in Urali, thus, exhibits some structural holes insofar as the vowels /i/ and /o/ do not have their centralized counterparts. Even the frequency of the centralized vowel phonemes is very less (Mohanlal 1991). The other two centralized vowels [ï] and [ö] have been pushed to the allophonic level.

8. POSITION OF CENTRALIZED VOWEL PHONEMES IN URALI

9. PHONETIC CHANGES AND LANGUAGE IDENTITY AND RETENTION

As Hall (1964: 297) points out, “the phonetic change precedes phonemic change." The phonetic change that has occurred in the Urali speech may be, at first instance, “non-significant, non-functional displacement in the speaker’s habit of articulation” (Hall 1964:297). However, these changes have now impacted the Urali phonological system in a very significant manner and have resulted in making a gap in the phonemic symmetry of the language. This testifies to the statement of Hall that “the phonemic change involves some displacement, not in pronunciation, but in the function of sounds.” It is this function of sounds and its displacement that has made a major transformation in the complete system of the language concerned. (There are several corresponding lexical and morphological changes in Urali. I will discuss these in another paper.)

10. INTRODUCE LITERACY IN MOTHER TONGUE TO PRESERVE THE TRIBAL LANGUAGE

As discussed earlier in this paper, the literary languages are less susceptible to change in this fashion, and that too in a drastic and abrupt manner. Providing a suitable script system to the Urali language and educating the Urali people to use that system to write their language will provide some stability and help maintain the identity of the language. Written symbols give a sense of dignity to the people, and establish conventions that over the time are hard to replace. Through this process, I venture to say, the Urali language and culture may be preserved better. The tribal languages that face extinction because of the influence of the dominant language need to be given tools that would help them not only preserve themselves but also to prosper and extend their domains of use.

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REFERENCES

Bright, William. 1976. Social Dialect and Language History. In Anwar S. Dil (ed.). Variation and Change.Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hall, Robert, A. Jr. 1964. Introductory Linguistics New York: Clinton Company.

Mohanlal, Sam. 1991. A Descriptive Analysis of Urali (Speech of a Dravidian Hill Tribe). Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages.

Rao, G.S. 1989. Sound Change, Lexical Diffusion, and Literacy In Aditi Mukherjee (ed.) Language Variation and Language Change. Hyderabad: Centre for Advanced Study in Linguistics, Osmania University.

Sturtevant, E.M. 1917. Linguistic Change: An Introduction to the Historical Study of Language. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Thundyil, Z. 1975. The Language of the Kadars. IJDL. Vol. 4:2, pp. 229-248.

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