Linguistic anthropologists have used the concept of "scale" to describe how everyday interactions are linked to global flows and movements, particularly in the urban centers of Europe and North America. This article reconceptualizes the notion of "scale" by examining how residents in a small market village in eastern India order, in both hierarchical and nonhierarchical configurations, multiple graphic repertoires in dialogic engagement with the built environment. In the article, I suggest that script is an important semiotic modality through which indigenous and nonindigenous residents align notions of community, language, and territory according to different evaluative metrics, often in conflicting and antagonistic ways. These differential scalings of multiple scripts on the village's surfaces, and the disjunctures that exist between these scalings illuminate how dominant language hegemonies are perpetuated and, at the same time, contested by indigenous and minority language communities. [script, scale, indigeneity, linguistic landscape, literacy] 6Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
This article examines the role of "borders" in the writing practices of Santali speakers, who are spread across the states of Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Assam in eastern India. A tension between a "trans-border" linguistic homogeneity and a "bordered" linguistic heterogeneity occurs in discussions around script. Santali is written in the various "official" scripts. Together with regional scripts, there is a recently invented script, called Ol Chiki ('writing symbol') in circulation as well as a Roman script invented by Christian missionaries. This article examines the alternating use of Ol Chiki, Roman and regional scripts in Santali language media. I argue that these media simultaneously posit a linguistically homogenous future while at the same time affirming a present that is deeply influenced by differing linguistic environments.
Present in many of the world's languages, expressives (also called ideophones or mimetics) are commonly discussed as iconic ‘depictions’ of speaker's sensual experiences. Yet anthropologists and linguists working with these constructions have noticed that they also index ‘social types’ that perdure across interactional events. This article analyzes the semiotic relation between depiction and social stereotypes embedded in expressive use by examining video data from interviews with speakers of Mundari, an expressive-rich Austro-Asiatic language spoken in eastern India. Presenting interview data taken from both lab-based elicitations as well as ethnographic interviews in Mundari-speaking villages, the article claims that speakers deploy multimodal resources such as gesture and gaze in concert with expressives in order to re-intepret social indexes as felt, embodied experiences (rheme) while also juxtaposing these experiences with elements in the immediately perceptible material world (dicent). The article also addresses issues of ethics, agency, and materiality entailed by multimodal expressive depiction. (Ideophones, multimodality, materiality, embodiment, semiotics)*
The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) proposes a revision to the Indian education system. The document foregrounds “mother tongue,” a concept that has been highly salient in India since the mid‐nineteenth century, by specifying that students should learn in it. But it makes little mention of English, despite its importance, and the desire for it, at every level of education. The construction of nation and language in the NEP begs a question: how do the constructions, foci, and relative silences of policy resonate with people's understandings and uses of languages? This article incorporates interviews at an engineering university in western India, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, to examine graduate students' reflections on mother tongue in relation to their multilingual practices on campus and at home. The students exhibited a range of ideological perspectives on mother tongue and English that are not addressed in policy measures. Using the heuristic of postcolonial semiotics, we show that the students were unable to simultaneously identify with the nation (via mother tongue) and English. We contribute to linguistic anthropology and South Asian studies by foregrounding people's metadiscourse in how they make sense of, and ultimately problematize, constructions of colonial and postcolonial policy.
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