Language, culture, and conceptions of uncertainty can impact the way that students respond to a statistical investigation. The aim of this small exploratory study was to gain insight into how two groups of children (aged 9-12) speaking different home dialects adopted expressions of uncertainty in a standard dialect used in school, specifically the…

The following paper will reveal the varieties of English pronunciation in India, its features and characteristics. This research helped us to consider the history of occurrence of English in India, the influence of local languages on it, the birth of its own unique English, which is used in India now. The research highlights the impact of English…

This study investigated the attitudes of 90 Thai learners toward English accents in relation to differing fields and stages of study, using a verbal-guise test (VGT) and a questionnaire. Respondents listened to and evaluated five speakers of English as a native language (ENL): American English (AmE) and British English (BrE), a second language…

Teaching cultural competency is a two-way street. Instruction is more comprehensive when it raises awareness of cultural context. And students see relevancy when they learn how theories and principles relate to the context they know. Cultural context is especially obvious in nations colonized by cultures different from theirs. India provides a…

Background: Bilingual speech production studies have highlighted that level of proficiency influences the acoustic-phonetic representation of phonemes in both languages (MacKay, Flege, Piske, & Schirru 2001; Zarate-Sandez, 2015). The results for bilingual speech production reveals that proficient/early bilinguals produce distinct acoustic…

This paper proposes a framework for multilingual language-in-education policy implementation, offered as a critically constructive response to India's recent "National Education Policy 2020" (GOI, 2020). Rooted in India's existing educational language policy, our linguistically inclusive 'Languages for Learning' (LFL) framework is, we…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

This paper outlines a method of auditory and acoustic analysis for determining the tonemes of a language starting from scratch, drawing on the author's experience of recording and analyzing tone languages of north-east India. The methodology is applied to a preliminary analysis of tone in the Thang dialect of Khiamniungan, a virtually undocumented…

Through a close analysis of an Indian woman's unsuccessful romance narrative, this article examines how class-based ideologies and prejudices concerning English and vernacular medium education sustain and perpetuate dismissive and disparaging attitudes toward people educated in the vernacular. The analysis utilizes theoretical understandings of…

The purpose of this study was to determine possible differences in voice onset time (VOT) between speakers of standard American English (AE) and Indian English (IE) in a continuous speech context. The participants were 20 AE speakers, who were native to the Northeastern Pennsylvania region, and 20 IE speakers from the Indian subcontinent who had…

This article develops the interface between language policy and planning and equal educational opportunity (EEO). Tracing the trajectory of the development "equal educational opportunity" as a normative ideal, this study argues that language policy must serve to promote "actualist" conceptions of EEO. To do this, acquisition…

THIS PAPER ATTEMPTS TO ANALYZE THE SOCIAL CAUSES FOR THE DIFFERENTIAL RATE OF CHANGE IN LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR BETWEEN BRAHMINS AND NON-BRAHMINS. INDICATIONS ARE THAT (1) INDIAN SPEECH COMMUNITIES ARE CONSCIOUS OF CASTE DIALECTS, (2) LINGUISTIC FORMS DIFFUSE MORE RAPIDLY AMONG LOWER-STATUS GROUPS, (3) THE SPEECH OF LOWER-STATUS GROUPS DISPLAYS FORMS…

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 author defines literacy as a communication skill and argues that India's national adult education program should promote vernacular literacy rather than standard language literacy, using the traditional vernacular oral communication channels with writing as an extension of but not a replacement for the oral mode. (MF)

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…