Speech Variation and the Study of Indian Civilization1

Abstract

the spread of features within a speech area. Furthermore, historically oriented structural linguists confine their research to historical linguistics or internal language history, the formal reconstruction of hypothetical parent varieties from a series of distinct languages or dialects, in contrast to external language history, the study of linguistic change in relation to the social currents which affect it. The great body of 19th and 20th century research on speech variation within single speech communities has as yet evoked little interest among either structural linguists or social scientists in the United States. Yet, much of this work is of central relevance for the studies of complex civilizations or intermediate societies as they have recently been termed (Casagrande 1959), which are becoming more and more common in modern anthropology. In contrast to many modern American linguists who, because of their concern with methodology, have often found it difficult to communicate with other students of culture, dialectologists-and especially those trained in the European tradition-tend to think of themselves primarily as cultural geographers, folklorists, or social historians. They regard linguistic analysis not as an end in itself but rather pursue it for the information it provides about the history and culture of a region. Thus, of the earlier work, the investigations of the German scholars Fischer, Haag, and Wrede have produced convincing evidence for the relationship between present-day dialect isoglosses and certain