This study examines the decisive role of translation as a method of linguistic documentation and its implications for language standardisation, focusing on the case of Rajbanshi, a language spoken in northeastern India. It critically engages with Charu Chandra Sanyal’s (1965) documentation of Rajbanshi in relation to earlier colonial initiatives, particularly Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1909), which employed translation as a primary tool for data collection. While translation has historically been seen as a neutral mechanism for representing linguistic diversity, this study argues that translation has instead functioned as an instrument of linguistic hierarchy and standardisation, reinforcing dominant language ideologies. By examining both colonial and post-colonial approaches to translation-based linguistic documentation, the study highlights how the standard language ideology (SLI), as conceptualised by Lippi-Green (1997) and Kroskrity (2004), has shaped Rajbanshi’s representation. It demonstrates how translation choices—ranging from lexical selection to value attribution—have influenced Rajbanshi’s classification as a dialect of Bengali, marginalising its linguistic distinctiveness. The analysis extends to contemporary linguistic policies, revealing how recent efforts to standardise Rajbanshi (2015-2016) echo colonial-era documentation biases. By tracing the historical trajectory of translation in linguistic data collection, this study calls for a re-evaluation of translation-based documentation methodologies to ensure more inclusive and representative linguistic records.

This paper examines the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), a monumental exercise supervised by George Grierson to survey and classify the languages of colonial India. It considers why the LSI developed into an atypical scheme that corresponded with a multiethnic and multinational network of officials and scholars to survey India's languages. It makes the case that the networked practice of surveying was reciprocated at different scales, from localised linguistic surveys in districts and princely states to gather information and specimens, to a loosely governed transnational exercise involving Indians and Europeans to edit, review and publish results. The paper argues that the LSI's scalar geographies were negotiated by Grierson and, more importantly, his assistant Gauri Kant Roy and demonstrates that scale, as an analytic or process, was not an abstraction or predetermined for those entangled in the LSI's survey of India's languages.

The People’s Linguistic Survey of India has listed at least 13 languages from Uttarakhand, none of which are a part of Indian Constitution’s Eight Schedule. However, two of them (Kumaoni and Garhwali) are a part of UNESCO’s list of endangered languages. Garhwali is spoken by 23 lakh people in Uttarkahnd, while Kumaoni is the native language of about 20 lakh people. More than 40% of the state's population communicate using native languages and yet Hindi is the only official language of Uttarakhand. This research article seeks to examine the language and educational policies at both state and national level, their goals, implementation, and effectiveness in supporting the regional languages of Uttarakhand.

ABSTRACT The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), supervised by the Anglo-Irish linguist and civil servant George A. Grierson, surveyed and classified more than seven hundred languages and dialects. An integral part of the state-funded survey was mapping where languages were spoken in India, which resulted in the publication of 45 language maps between 1899 and 1927. As individual maps they are comparable to other thematic maps of the period. As a series of language maps, however, they are inconsistent in scale, colour, use of relief and labels, and depiction of boundaries. This paper argues that the inconsistency in presentation reflected the LSI’s experimental approach to mapping language, trying to reconcile the approximate representation of a complex geographical phenomenon with the colonial state’s expectation for accurate and up-to-date language maps.

ABSTRACT Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1903–1928) is one of the most complete sources on South Asian languages. It has influenced all subsequent studies of the language situation in India. However, there are indications in the Survey’s volumes, in its unpublished files, and in Grierson’s correspondence, that extra-linguistic considerations affected his approach to some Indian languages. Drawing on these sources, this essay focuses on Panjabi, Siraiki, Assamese, and Hindi-Urdu. It shows how factors stemming from Grierson’s views on religious difference and on language as a basis for nationality, as well as colonial politics of governance, may have influenced his characterisations of these languages. However, this does not invalidate the Survey, which is not straightforwardly ‘colonial’. Moreover, each of these languages is also described using linguistic argumentation, as reflected in the LSI’s skeletal grammars and its focus on dialectal variation. As such, we have to work with this tension in the LSI, without trying to resolve it either by rejecting the Survey in toto because of the instances of politics affecting its analyses, or by accepting it wholesale while ignoring the extra-linguistic considerations which influenced how it characterised some Indian languages.

Review. A colonial monument de-constructed: Majeed on Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India

Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, written by Majeed, Javed Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, written by Majeed, Javed

Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, by Javed MajeedNation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, by Javed Majeed

Summary In this article, I explore glossing practices in the period surrounding the publication of the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), the large-scale survey of languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent at the turn of the 20th century, under the stewardship of George Abraham Grierson (1851–1941). After a brief discussion of the reasons that the LSI constitutes a useful corpus for studying glossing practices, I provide a detailed examination of the glossing practices used in the text specimens which accompany language descriptions in the LSI. I then contrast these practices with glossing in materials produced both prior to and subsequent to the LSI, in order to place the glossing practices established by Grierson within a historical context, thereby contributing a description of one step in the history of glossing of descriptive linguistic materials.

The “Vernacular” Babel: The<i>Linguistic Survey of India</i>and Colonial Philology

Abstract We present initial exploratory work on illuminating the long-standing question of areal versus genealogical connections in South Asia using computational data visualization tools. With respect to genealogy, we focus on the subclassification of Indo-Aryan, the most ubiquitous language family of South Asia. The intent here is methodological: we explore computational methods for visualizing large datasets of linguistic features, in our case 63 features from 200 languages representing four language families of South Asia, coming out of a digitized version of Grierson’sLinguistic Survey of India. To this dataset we apply phylogenetic software originally developed in the context of computational biology for clustering the languages and displaying the clusters in the form of networks. We further exploremultiple correspondence analysisas a way of illustrating how linguistic feature bundles correlate with extrinsically defined groupings of languages (genealogical and geographical). Finally, map visualization of combinations of linguistic features and language genealogy is suggested as an aid in distinguishing genealogical and areal features. On the whole, our results are in line with the conclusions of earlier studies: Areality and genealogy are strongly intertwined in South Asia, the traditional lower-level subclassification of Indo-Aryan is largely upheld, and there is a clearly discernible areal east–west divide cutting across language families.

Grierson and the Language of Languages - Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India. By Javed Majeed. New York: Routledge, 2019. 266 pp. ISBN: 9780367183226 (cloth). - Nation and Region in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India. By Javed Majeed. New York: Routledge, 2019. 230 pp. ISBN: 9781138556706 (cloth).

Abstract This paper has two purposes. Firstly, it provides a bird’s eye view of the characteristics of a variety of Gujarati in diaspora, viz. that spoken in Cape Town, South Africa for almost 150 years. Secondly it focusses on one notable feature, viz. the prominence of retroflexes over dentals, and connects this with other dialects of Gujarati in India and with Western Indo-Aryan. We analyse the speech of 32 speakers born or brought up in South Africa, and resident in Cape Town. We show that Cape Town Gujarati retains the dialect variation of late nineteenth century Gujarati as identified by Grierson, Sir George A. 1908. Linguistic survey of India. Vol IX, part II: Indo-Aryan family, Central Group – Rajasthani and Gujarati. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. In particular, it resembles the Surti dialect, in keeping with the fact that the area around Surat district provided the bulk of migrants to Cape Town in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We then focus in detail on a prominent, but little-studied, phenomenon of Gujarati dialects: the variable occurrence of retroflex stops where Standard Gujarati has dentals [t̪ t̪h d̪ d̪h]. We demonstrate the considerable amount of such “retroflex boosting” in the Cape Town variety. We provide a detailed and replicable methodology from variationist sociolinguistics for studying this boosting that we believe illuminates the study of its occurrence in modern dialects in Gujarat.

The aim of this paper is to explore the number system in Thali, a variety of Punjabi spoken by natives of Thal desert. There are three number categories singular, dual, and plural but all modern Indo Aryan languages have only singular and plural (Bashir &amp;amp; Kazmi, 2012, p. 119). It is one of the indigenous languages of Pakistan from the Lahnda group as described by Grierson (1819) in his benchmark book Linguistic Survey of India. Layyah is one of the prominent areas of Thal regions. The native speakers of Thali use this sub dialect of Saraiki in their household and professional life. The linguistic boundaries of the present Siraiki belt have changed under different linguistic variational rules as described by Labov (1963), Trudgal (2004), Eckert (2002) and Meryhoff (2008). There are many differences between Thali and Saraiki, on phonological, morphological and orthographical levels. Husain (2017) has pointed out linguistic differences between Saraiki and Lahnda and Thali is one of the popular languages of Lahnda spoken in different parts of Thal regions. According to the local language activists, Thali has been greatly influenced by Saraiki and Punjabi. The lexicon of Thali is composed for 20% of Punjabi, 45% of Saraiki, and 5% of loan words particularly English. Another particularity is that Perso-Arabic characters are used to write Thali. The most distinguishing characteristics of Thali are its parts of speech, word order, case marking, verb conjugation and, finally, usage of grammatical categories in terms of number, person, tense, voice and gender. In this perspective, number marking is the area to focus on noun morphology and exclusively on the recognition of number system in Thali nouns. The analysis of linguistic systems including grammar, lexicon, and phonology provide sound justifications of number marking systems in languages of the world (Chohan &amp;amp; Garc&amp;iacute;a, 2019).

This paper examines whether similarity in social identities between a manager and the board affects executive compensation, firm value, and agency frictions. By using a novel dataset on surnames with multiple identities (native language, native place, and caste), developed by merging micro census data of 474 million Indians with Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) data, I provide evidence that the firms with a shared group identity between a manager and the board do well compare to other firms and due to in-group favoritism, managers of such firms earn higher compensation. These results are stronger for group identity based on native language and native place. I also find that the firm benefits from taking on the cost of in-group favoritism as it reduces the agency frictions and increases firm value in the long run. These results are robust to the endogeneity test, managerial influence on firm, college ties, ties from past employment, and various other checks.

Abstract TheLinguistic Survey of India(LSI), edited and compiled by George Abraham Grierson, was the first systematic effort by the British colonial government to document the spoken languages and dialects of India. While Grierson advocated an approach to philology that dismissed the affinity of language to race, theLSImobilizes a complex, intertextual set of racializing discourses that form the ideological ground upon which representations of language were constructed and naturalized. I analyze a sub-set of theLSI’s volumes in order to demonstrate how Grierson’s linguistic descriptions and categorizations racialize minority languages and their speakers as corrupt, impure, and uncivilized. I highlight how semiotic processes in the text construct speakers as possessing essential “ethnic” characteristics that are seen as indexical of naturalized linguistic differences. I argue that metapragmatic statements within descriptions of languages and dialects are made possible by ethnological discourses that ultimately reinforce an indexical relationship between language and race. This analysis of the survey sheds light on the centrality of language in colonial constructions of social difference in India, as well as the continued importance of language as a tool for legitimating claims for political recognition in postcolonial India.

Since ancient times India has been a multilingual society and languages in India have thrived though at times many races and religions came into conflict. The states in modern India were reorganised on linguistic basis in 1956 yet in contrast to the European notion of one language one nation, majority of the states have more than one official language. The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) conducted by Grierson between 1866 and 1927 identified 179 languages and 544 dialects. The first post-independence Indian census after (1951) listed 845 languages including dialects. The 1991 Census identified 216 mother tongues were identified while in 2001 their number was 234. The three-language formula devised to maintain the multilingual character of the nation and paying due attention to the importance of mother tongue is widely accepted in the country in imparting the education at primary and secondary levels. However, higher education system in India impedes multilingualism. 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Reviewed by: Dalit Literatures in India eds. by Joshil K. Abraham and Judith Misrahi-Barak Anushiya Ramaswamy (bio) Joshil K. Abraham and Judith Misrahi-Barak, eds. Dalit Literatures in India. New Delhi: Routledge, 2016. Pp. 366. US$160. In their introduction, the editors of Dalit Literatures in India, Joshil K. Abraham and Judith Misrahi-Barak, quite rightly ask, "[H]ow is it possible that the major political and literary development that has deeply altered the Indian academic and non-academic world as well as Indian society at large in the last three decades, has not had a greater echo outside India?" (1). Almost all Indian literary language journals and presses since the 1990s have regularly published Dalit literature; in fact, Dalit-identified writers have worked assiduously to define the field as "Dalit" rather than "working class" or "Marxist" literature (as in the case of the Sri Lankan Tamil Dalit writer K. Daniel whose novels published in the 1960s and 1970s, set in Northern Sri Lankan Dalit communities, were described as part of his leftist activism). It is not an exaggeration to claim that the most exciting development in many regional languages in recent years is a result of Dalit writing, instantly identifiable by its powerfully articulated refusal of local pieties. Dalit literature is deeply aware of its need to bring something new into the world. Even the coining of the name "Dalit"—which means "broken people"—as a collective term referring to the various Dalit-identified communities living on the subcontinent and in the diaspora connotes a history of powerlessness. Dalit Literatures in India presents Dalit issues to non-Indian readers who lack rudimentary knowledge about the phenomenon of Dalit literature. The first essay, which sets the tone for the collection, is by G. N. Devy, the Chair of the People's Linguistic Survey of India. This is a survey administered by thousands of volunteer activists in order to mitigate the official Census of India's inability to count all reported languages. Elsewhere, Devy has written persuasively on the politics of such classifications, since state language policies impact the very survival of the speakers of minority languages. But the essay in the collection here, "Caste Differently," is reprinted from the literary magazine Fountain Ink and summarizes key Dalit criticisms of Indian scriptural discourses (drawn mostly from B. R. Ambedkar) then highlights the British colonial administrative actions that are the foundational epistemes of contemporary Indian caste society. For the reader who expects to read about the current controversies over Bhashas (the indigenous languages of the subcontinent), which are at the heart of Devy's work, the explanatory mode of the essay, which avoids the vibrant polemic that characterizes his work elsewhere, is a disappointment. [End Page 258] Even a seasoned academic like M. S. S. Pandian, in "Caste and Democracy: Three Paradoxes," writes a general essay on the topic rather than the expected continuation of the epilogue from his polemical Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, which quotes the Tamil Dalit philosopher and literary writer Raj Gowthaman. Given that Dalit scholarly writing is thriving in multiple Indian languages, the volume has few striking essays on literature. Pramod K. Nayar has one of the best essays in the collection on the Indian graphic novel A Gardner in the Wastland; K. Satyanarayana has a superb essay on the convergences of the Durban Discourse (the human rights rhetoric that came into being in the wake of the 2001 Durban conference on race) and the cosmopolitan Dalit identity presented in Narendhra Jadhav's 2003 memoir, Outcaste: A Memoir; and Rajkumar Hans' essay on the ignored Dalit intellectual poets of Punjab from the late seventeenth to early twentieth century is important. Since Dalit literatures are produced in various Indian languages, a book of this kind must clearly and explicitly identify regional languages and dialects. For instance, I had to email the translator, K. Satchidanandan, to find out the language of the excerpted poem by S. Joseph that opens the editors' introduction (it is Malayalam). We should take a page from W. E. B. Du Bois, Kancha Ilaiah, or B. R. Ambedkar, who consciously locate themselves in their texts as partisan speakers of a minority group. For instance, in...

Hindi, in its totality, refers to a dialect continuum spoken mainly across northern India. This continuum is usually divided into two forms: Eastern and Western Hindi. Eastern Hindi is mainly made up of Awadhi, Chhattisgarhi and Bagheli dialects, while Western Hindi consists of Hindostani, Banagru, Braj Bhaka, Bundeli and Kanauji dialects.After Linguistic survey of India (1894-1928) by George A. Grierson – there has been little or no work which specifically focuses on Kanauji. Trivedi (1993, 2005) and Mishra and Bali (2010, 2011) report some secondary data from Kanauji in their works, their focus of inquiry is not Kanauji though. Lewis, Simons &amp; Fennig (2013) refers Kanauji as a language with very low identity.This paper attempts to study the current sociolinguistic situation of Kanauji spoken in the Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh (India). Some other goals of the paper are following: 1) to feel the pulse of language attitude, with reference to standard Hindi, of the people in Kanpur 2) to present basic linguistic information and 3) to direct attention of the other linguists to Kanauji, which unfortunately has not been the case so far despite of it being mother tongue of millions.This study is result of eighteen days of a fieldtrip to Kanpur district and subsequent preparation of a small speech database of Kanauji. Importance of the work lies in the fact that no previous work, which specifically focuses on Kanauji, has been published so far. This is true at least in the open literature.

Raji is a little known tribal community whose descendants are the prehistoric Kiratas. They live in dense forests far away from the surrounding Kumauni villages of Pithoragarh district, in the state of Uttarakhand, India. In 2001 census their population was reported to be 680 in all the nine villages. Sir George Grierson, in his book ‘Linguistic Survey of India’ had named this language as ‘janggali which has only spoken form.' Following the framework established by Wurm and the stages of threatenedness discussed in Fishman’s GIDS, Raji can be assessed as ‘potentially endangered andat stage 6 (language) which means the language is at risk.’ While chalking out a revitalization programme for this oral language the author realized the need of orthography development for this language. It is an established fact that Orthography gives stability to a language and not only conserves it but also helps in its standardization. So after preparing a small grammar book, with the help of collected phonologicaland grammatical material of Raji the next important task before the researcher was to develop an orthography system. The present paper focuses on the early stages of orthography development for this previously undocumented indigenous language.