This study was conducted in Maharashtra, India with children studying in a regional medium (Marathi) government school. In Marathi, the translation of the word 'about' is not very commonly used. The aim of the study was to see how the children used uncertain language about prediction while engaged in a statistical investigation and how children…

Linguistic landscaping (LL) is an emerging field of Sociolinguistics exploring the language in its textual form in public sphere. This paper investigates the visibility and prominence of languages in the public space of Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India. A total of 10 city neighborhoods are chosen for the study. The corpus of the study is…

Writing reflects some of the different characteristics of the language being used and of the people who are communicating. The present paper focusses on the internal written communication in international and inter-disciplinary research projects. Using a case study of an international public health research project, it argues that the authorship…

This study investigates language attitudes expressed by public university students in India at various layers of agentive "positionality" as an integral part of their dynamic language ecologies. This is achieved through the qualitative analysis of three focus group interviews conducted at three public universities in India with the…

India is currently home to one of the world's largest English-speaking communities, in a context where the language is increasingly seen as a gateway to the world. Given the plurality of the country's social and linguistic landscape, however, a significant amount of the population does not speak or have access to the language. The impact of…

This paper examines emerging forms of multilingualism and multiliteracy in rural India (where the term "literacy" is used broadly here to include digital media literacy and marketing literacy as well as literacy in the traditional sense of the knowledge of a writing system). Here forces of globalization and digital communication have…

The role of English and the status of English language instruction is reported for Burma, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Lesotho, New Zealand, Pakistan, Qatar, and Malaysia. The profile for each country contains a summary of English instruction within and outside of the educational system, teacher supply and qualifications,…

Reports on the role of English and English instruction in 10 countries are updated. Recent developments in literature instruction are reported for Austria, Bangladesh, Cyprus, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Israel, the Netherlands, Thailand, and Tunisia. Among the topics summarized are the role of English instruction in the educational systems of…

A study examined traditional Hindi songs typically sung by women during north Indian weddings, using pragmatic and semantic analysis. Some historical and cultural background for the practice of women's singing at weddings is offered. It is suggested that gender roles are defined and regulated through the language of this speech event, and that…

Indian languages seem to have emerged from a phase of total dependence on English for new input. Several Indian languages have now evolved vocabularies and structural nuances to handle several new registers and styles necessary for modern society. Some of the change has occurred through conscious language policy encouraging multilingualism and the…

This paper is a study in language acculturation with special reference to the Indianization of the English language. It briefly traces the history of the diffusion of bilingualism in English on the culturally and linguistically pluralistic Indian subcontinent. The functional roles of English are discussed and the formal influences of Indian…

This article discusses the language planning problems that India faces. The distribution and usage of the various languages are outlined. There is considerable linguistic heterogeneity, with 80 languages currently being used as media of instruction at least at an elementary level, and 14 languages being used at the secondary level. Since language…

The notion of language dependency presupposes that there is a hierarchy of languages in a multilingual society, and that each language is assigned a functional role in a multilingual individual's restricted or extended spheres of linguistic interaction. In South Asia, language dependency has resulted in linguistic convergence of two types: (1)…

The Ljubljana seminar, whose background and working papers are presented in this volume, was an outcome of the United Nations' consideration of the problems of ethnic and linguistic minorities. The twenty-five papers cover topics such as the study of multinational societies; the protection of minorities and minority rights in Yugoslavia,…

In India, the use of language dialect and style, like many aspects of Indian thought and life, follows a continuum from the ritually pure and worthy of respect to the ritually defiled and unworthy. In North India, according to adult informants, Hindi is spoken at school, in formal business contacts or government offices, in formal ceremonies; it…