Dialects Are The Avantgarde Teams Exploring New Semantic Possibilities

Linguist GANESH DEVY has just published a new volume of a unique language survey that is based on geography and people's vernacular claims. He speaks to RAJAT GHAI on the link between languages and ecology

- Rajat Ghai

Rather than the intricacies of historical linguistics or language families, your team focused on geographical distinctions and people's claims about languages while conducting the survey. Why?

 As the name suggests, the People’s Linguistic Survey of India is people centric. It is not an academic project by any group of linguists. It is born out of a deep concern for communities whose very existence is being denied. Geography appeared to me as a necessary perspective for the study. This required getting out of the historical or genealogical straight jackets espoused by historical linguistics.

So you accepted people's claims on languages. Did you distinguish between dialects and languages? Would such a survey be considered accurate by linguistics? The assumption in your question is that people who make a claim on a language as their language necessarily have a very narrow outlook resulting in a non-tenable splintering of a larger language into numerous self-proclaimed independent languages. This assumption, however, does not hold when one looks closely at people’s attitude towards languages, particularly in a country that does not cherish monolingualism as a culturally desirable practice.

If one were to examine a contrary assumption arising out of the established practice of field linguistics, one notices that there is an unnatural tendency among professional scholars to draw boundaries between languages in a somewhat abstract manner.