Abstract
The Linguistic 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, the LSI mobilizes 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 the LSI’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.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to E. Annamalai, whose immense intellectual generosity made this article possible. Thanks also to Vinay Lal, Nivedita Nath, Nana Osei-Opare, Sebastiaan Broere, Naveen Kanalu, Mohsin Malik Ali, and Matt Reeck for their early input on this article. I also want to thank Erin Debenport, Alessandro Duranti, Candy Goodwin, Paul Kroskrity, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Constantine Nakassis, Elinor Ochs, Jonathan Rosa, Shalini Shankar, Michael Silverstein, and the numerous members of the UCLA Discourse Laboratory for their comments at various stages of writing. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue for their helpful feedback. All errors and shortcomings are my own.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Surveying languages: the art of governing speakers with numbers
- It’s all about English: the interplay of monolingual ideologies, language policies and the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics on multilingualism
- How to ask questions on language? Ideological struggles in the making of a state survey
- Counting matters: quantifying the vitality and value of Basque
- “In the mouth of an aborigine”: language ideologies and logics of racialization in the Linguistic Survey of India
- Language and ethnic statistics in twentieth century Sudanese censuses and surveys
- Book Reviews
- Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrández Sabine Kradolfer: Everlasting countdowns: race, ethnicity and national censuses in Latin American states
- Cacophonies d’empire: Le gouvernement des langues dans l’Empire russe et l’Union soviétique
- Small Languages and Small Language Communities
- Tracing the “extinctness” of Tai Ahom: issues of language loss and death
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Surveying languages: the art of governing speakers with numbers
- It’s all about English: the interplay of monolingual ideologies, language policies and the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics on multilingualism
- How to ask questions on language? Ideological struggles in the making of a state survey
- Counting matters: quantifying the vitality and value of Basque
- “In the mouth of an aborigine”: language ideologies and logics of racialization in the Linguistic Survey of India
- Language and ethnic statistics in twentieth century Sudanese censuses and surveys
- Book Reviews
- Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrández Sabine Kradolfer: Everlasting countdowns: race, ethnicity and national censuses in Latin American states
- Cacophonies d’empire: Le gouvernement des langues dans l’Empire russe et l’Union soviétique
- Small Languages and Small Language Communities
- Tracing the “extinctness” of Tai Ahom: issues of language loss and death