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LA N GU A GE
MODERNIZATION:
STRUCTURAL
AND
SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS
S.
N. SRIDHAR
State
University of New York at Stony Brook
Department
of Linguistics
NEW
YORK
- USA
INVITED PAPER
7/21/2019 Language Modernization - Structural and Sociolinguistic Aspects S. N. Sridhar
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INTRODUCTION
Language modernization has been defined, in a widely cited statement by Charles
Ferguson
(1968 )
as
"the p rocess by whic h (a language beco m es) the equal of other develop ed
languages as a medium of communication; it is in a sense the process of
joining the world community of increasingly intertranslatable languages recog-
nized
as
appropriate vehicles
of
modern
forms of
discourse".
Note that the criterion of success
specified
in this definition involves an external
reference
point,
other
developed languages , rather than a
language—
(or culture—) internal
one of,
say, "serving
as the
adequate vehicle
for the
expression
of the
current ideas
of its
speakers" (e.g.
in the
domain
of
computers ) ,
or an
omnibus one , such
as,
being able
to
express
the
ideas
of
mo dern society". This exoglossic criterion, emph asized
by the
notion
of
intertranslatability with developed languages, distinguishes the modernization of the lan-
guages
of
developing societies
(such as the
languages
of
Asia
an d Africa) and the less
develo ped languages of developed coun tries (such as Basque) from routin e language chang e
characteristic of all languages.
The
developing nations,
as
Rudolph
and
Rudolph
(1972 )
have said, "directly import
advanced institutional structures which elsewhere emerged only
after a
long period
of
scientific
invention or experimentation". This "telescoping of development", as Das Gupta
(1976 ) has aptly called it, has meant that new concepts and expressions have
flooded
th e
developing languages
at a
rate perhaps u nprecedented even
in the
history
of the now
developed
laguages. In
coping with
the
demands
of
development ,
the
languages
of the
developing nations (or developing languages, hereafter) have shown
different
"resource
preferences", ranging
from
a near-total reliance on indig enou s resou rces (e.g. in the case of
Hungarian,
and to a
lesser extent, Tamil)
to a
ra ther heavy dependency
on
other languages
(e.g.
Japanese,
Kannada
and
others),
as
well
as
very interesting comprom ises
in
between.
The
developing languages also, of course, differ in the linguistic processes emp loyed in m ode rni-
zation and the effects of these processes on the structure of the language (on the lexical,
mo rphological, and syn tactic levels), on the creation, mainten anc e, and neu tralization of
style
differences,
and the sociolinguistic concom itants of these changes. Thus language m ode rniz a-
tion
as a
process
is
potentially
of
interest
to a
n u m b e r
of
areas
of
linguistic research,
including descriptive and theoretical linguistics
(with
reference to, for example, word-formation
processes and their productivity, especially in the case of co-existing morphological systems),
historical linguistics (contact-induced versus spontaneous language change),
sociolinguistics
(study of
bilingualism , diglossia, dialect intelligibility, register-crea tion) ,
and the
sociology
of
language (especially language attitudes regarding p urism and pride, and language planning),
among others.
In
this paper,
my aim is to
demonstrate
th e
value
of
studying language moderniza-
tion as an integrated process, with structural, stylistic, and sociolinguistic dimensions. In
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particular, I would like to show that an analysis of the considerations involved in the choice
of
part icular preferences
and
mechan i sms
fo r
modernization provides insights into
th e
dyna-
mics
of inter-lingual a nd inter-cultural relationships, esp ecially in mu ltilingual societies. Also,
th e study of the
effects
of modernizat ion on language structure an d style can help us better
understand th e functional bases of linguistic chang e and the emergence of style
differences.
I
shall
illustrate th e discussion with reference to the modernizat ion of the languages of India,
especially Kannada.
2 MODERNIZATION IN THE CONTEXT OF INDIAN LANGUAGES
Since
the languages of India are at different stages of development, modernizat ion
involves quite different needs depending
on the
language.
In the
case
of the
"unwritten"
languages, which
are
spoken
by
minori ty communit ies
in
different states,
th e
urgent need
is
that of devising wri t ing systems. Another , perhaps more fundamental and antecedent need
for
these languages is
legitimization ,
that is, recognition, both by the governments and by
the
speakers themselves,
of the use of
these languages
in
inst i tut ional domains, such
as
administration, education, mass media, and commerce.
In the
case
of the
major regional languages
—which
among them const i tute
th e
mother
tongues of more than 8 0 ° /o of India's
population—
modernizat ion involves not so much
graphization or legitimization as development of additional lexical, syntactic, and discourse
features,
and
standardizat ion.
It is
these languages that
I
shall focus upon
in the
rest
of
this paper.
In the
1971
Census of
India, 1652 mother tongues were reported.
30
languages were
reported
as the
mother tongue
of at
least half
a
million persons each,
and
scores
of
others
by
fewer speakers. Of these, th e fol lowing are some of the more widely spoken languages
(often
referred to as the
major
regional
languages) .
Table 1. The major languages of India
Assamese Marathi
Bengali
Oriya
Gujarat
Panjabi
Hindi
Sindhi
Kannada Tamil
Kashmiri
Telugu
Malayalam
U r d u
Hindi ,
spoken by about 35-40 % of the population, is the country's official language, with
English serving as the associate
official
language for the
near
future at least.
It
is a fact often overlooked that, important as Hindi and English are, it is primarily
these "regional lang uages" (H indi, in its role as a regional lang uage also belongs in this
group)
that
form th e
backbone
of the
nat ion —these
are the
languages closest
to the
people
and therefore th e primary focus of India's development and self-expression.
Despite a long history of literary cultivation (spanning over a thousand years, in the
case of languages like Tamil and Kannada), these languages are still in various stages of
development
toward functioning
as
full-fledged modern languages
in the
sense
of
Fergu-
son's
definition
cited above. The major reason fo r this lag has been th e fact that these
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languages never got a chance to serve as media in the areas of education, administration,
law, science and technology, and international communication during the post-Renaissance
period when most of the languages of Europe became modernized. While the European
languages were acquiring modern registers, these languages remained confined to essentially
the
areas
of the humanities , and
thus were exponents
of
what Alisjahbana ( 1 9 6 7 b ) calls — in
a not particularly happy choice of terms— expressive culture, as opposed to progressive
culture .
Most of the regional languages mentioned above have been recognized as the official
language of the state(s) in which they are spoken by the majori ty of people. Yet, there is still
considerable dependence on English, in such domains as higher level administration, judi-
ciary,
and, especially, in higher education and research in the areas of science and techno-
logy. The states of India are moving toward the goal of replacing English
with
the regional
languages in all spheres of activity at the regional level, and with Hindi at the national (or
federal) level. It is in this context that the need for language modernization is felt to be a
pressing one, especially
in the
context
of an
egalitarian social system envisaged
in the
Indian
Constitution.
Krishnamurti ( 1 9 8 4 : 9 7 ) has pointed out that these languages share certain positive
and negative
features
of history with respect to language development:
"(1) They all have literary traditions of varying degrees of antiquity, ranging
from
the
early Christian
era in the
case
of
Tamil
to the
recent past
in the
case of Panjabi and Sindhi.
(2)
In all
these languages, prose
is of
recent origin, developed under
the
impact of the English language and the spread of mass media.
(3)
They all have
f lexible,
modern, standard varieties
which
are used as
vehicles of
prose writing. There
are
differing degrees
of
distance between
the emerging standard and the other social/regional non-standard varieties.
(4)
All of them (with, perhaps, th e exception of Tamil) borrow
freely from
Sanskrit as a learned language and each has imbibed, through socio-
political contact,
an
element
of
Perso-Arabic vocabulary
in the
fields
of
judiciary,
revenue, and public administration.
(5 )
None
of
them
had
earlier possessed
the
concepts
and
expressions preci-
sely suited to the political and economic systems that we have opted for
since becoming independent.
Krishnamurti goes on to say that because of these shared features, there has not been much
difference either in the nature or degree of 'modernization' which the major Indian
languages have achieved during
the
past fifty years
or so (ibid). In the
light
of
these
observations,
it is
possible
to get a fairly
accurate picture
of the
problems
and
processes
of
language modernization in India by studying the case of one of these major regional
languages.
My
data
is
drawn
from
Kannada, which
is the
majority
and
official
language
of
the South Indian state of Karnataka, and is spoken by about 30 million people. It is a
Dravidian language, with Subject-Object-Verb basic word order, agglutinating morphology,
and a continuous literary history going back to about the 9th century A.D. (For details
regarding the structure of the language, see Schiffman 1982, and Sridhar (forthcoming)) .
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3 MACRO STRATEGIES IN
LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT
CHOICE
OF DONOR LANGUAGE
A modernizing language, especially one with a complex history of bi- or multilingua-
lism, is faced with a range of options with regard to the sources of lexical an d other elements
needed for language development. This is what I would call the issue of
macro
strategy" in
language development. At one theoretical extreme is an exclusive reliance on internal
resources
(I
shall call this strategy indigenization .
At the
other hypothetical extreme
is
wholesale importation
of
linguistic devices
an d
elements
(I
shall refer
to
this
as
c r y p t o c r e o l i z f l
tion . (I
call
the
latter strategy c rypto-creo lization, rather than borrowing, simp ly
to
distinguish
th e
extreme nature
of
this hypothetical case
from th e
more commonly encountereed cases
of
borrowing . Most cases
of
modernization involve strategies that
ar e
intermediate between these
extremes, and in
fact, often involve interest ing compromises,
as we
shall see.
Of course, languages tend to vary in the degree to which they rely on indigenous or
foreign sources
fo r
lexical development.
(Since
lexical elements
are the
most salient elements
in the speakers' language awareness, I shall use that as a short hand for the entire gamut of
modernization strategies, including syntactic, rhetorical, and discourse strategies). Every lan-
guage community seems
to
have
a
school
of
opinion which holds that (excessive) borrowing
dilutes the
essential character
of the
language. This
is the
purist position (See Wexler 1974) .
This attitude is often compounded by politico-cultural factors in communit ies with a history
of political or cultural domination by an external power: by relying on indigenous sources,
the developing language can assert its identity, even when the dominant language would
otherwise
be the
most natural (because
th e
mos t familiar) source
fo r
borrowing. This argu-
ment carries a lot of weight in the case of languages which have been victims of at tempted
suppression, persecution or discrimination, and which are at tempting to define and assert
their cultural identity
(like
Basque and many Asian and African languages). Apart from these
cultural
an d
political arguments, this
indigenizat ion
strategy
is
also advocated
on
grounds
of
efficiency
an d
fairness
as
well: borrowing
is
criticized
as
elitist while creation
from
native
sources
is held to be easier to understand —the new language would be closer to the common
people.
As
Alisjahbana (1976 )
has
observed, Bahasa Indonesia prefers coining
to
borrowing,
and if the latter strategy is used, th e preferred sources are: an Indonesian language, Sanskrit ,
Old Javane se, Arab ic, or English, in that order.
It is
worth noting that this strategy
is
considered ideal even
by
those language
communit ies
which
do not
practise
it. It is,
apparently,
good
politics, though
fraught with
difficulties
when put into practice. The
appeal
of indigenization is based on an imp ortant
unstated assumption that
is, in fact,
often untenable.
The
assumption
is
that
th e
material
fo r
coining new
words
and
expressions will come
from
contemporary varieties
of the
language.
In
practice, indigenization often involves resorting
to
archaic
or
obsolete lexical stock, mainly
from Classical literature.
Despite
their native
origin
(even that is not always
certain; they
may
have been borrowed
from
some other sources at an earlier stage), and the phonotactic and
other structural advantages that follow
from
this consideration, these coinings are,
in
terms
of
semantic transparency
or
naturalness,
or familiarity to the
potential users,
no
different
from
potential borrowings and sometimes more opaque (because less familiar) Thus, indigeniza-
tion becomes, in effect, Classicization (see
below).
In
contrast
to the
position
of the
purists
or
nationalists,
one
also
can
identify
an
equally well-articulated, though admittedly less idealistic or popular, position that I shall refer
to as the
Pragmatist
position. Here,
th e
source
of a
word
is
considered irrelevant: what
is
crucial is the test of usage — i f an expression is in current usage, it should be adopted; there is
no
sense
in
replacing
a
familiar term with
an
unfamiliar one, merely
for the
sake
of
purity .
The pragmatists are also concerned with supra-regional (e.g., Pan-Indian, Pan-Arab, Pan-
European, international, etc.) intelligibility
or
uniformity
and see
little merit
in
replacing
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internationally
accepted or standardized terminology (in the sciences and technology, espe-
cially)
with
indigenous equivalents that are not necessarily intelligible even within the region
of the developing language.
In
between these
well-defined
positions, there
are a
number
of
intermediate possibili-
ties, of course. No language is an exclusively borrowing language, nor is any immune to
borrowing. Most developing languages attempt to
disguise
their borrowing with
caiques ,
or
loan translations. In cultures with an established Classical tradition involving a prestige
language (such
as
Latin
and
Greek
in
Europe
and
Sanskrit
in
South Asia), there
is a
very
strong tendenc y to draw upo n the lexical stock, and derivational resources, of the Classical
language, even when that language may not have been a widely spoken language for
centuries. I shall
refer
to this strategy as Neo-Classicizfltion. It is interesting to note that
neo-classicization strategy generally invites much less virulent opposition
from th e
purists
than borrowing from
a
modern foreign language
(or the former
colonial language). This
is
mainly
because the Classical language is felt to be part of the indigenous tradition, while the
foreign donor language is perceived as a threat to the developing language's identity.
4 SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXT AND CHOICE OF RESOURCES FOR
MODERNIZATION
In understanding the choice of resource resorted to by a language in mod ernizing
itself —i.e., in opting fo r borrowing, or neo-Classicalization, or indigenization, th e crucial
operating variable seems to be not so much the relative usefulness of the linguistic resources
available
to the
modernizing language
as the
sociolinguistic context
in
which modernization
takes place. The Indian languages are cases in point. M ost of the major regional languages
—whether
they belong to the Indo-Aryan or Dravidian
family—
have
been
quite open to
Sanskrit , English and Perso-Arabic, in that order, for developing their vocabularies. In the
case
of the
Indo-Aryan languages,
of
course, they
are
direct descendents
of
Sanskri t
an d
stand in the same relationship to it as the Romance languages do to Latin. It is,
therefore,
not
surprising that they should turn to the Classical stages of their parent language to create new
vocabulary. Even
in the
case
of the
Dravidian languages,
as
Burrow
and
Emeneau (1962)
point
out in
their Introduction
to the
Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, there
is a
"tendency
for al l
four
of the
Dravidian literary languages
in the
south
to
make literary
use of the
total
Sanskrit lexicon indiscriminately (p. 1)". Of these languages, M alayalam seems to be the
mo st Sansk ritized, Telugu an d K anna da next, and Tam il the least Sanskritized. So many of
Sanskrit words have been used for so long in these languages, and in every register, not only
in
the learned domains, that they have become an integral part of the vocabulary, even basic
vocabu lary (see Sridhar 19 7 4,
1981),
and most native speakers are unaware of the Sanskritic
origin. In any written discourse, it would not be untypical to find anywhere from 50 %-80 %
of the
words originally coming
from
Sanskrit. This intimate relationship with Sanskri t
is an
important
factor in the
choice
of
resources
fo r
modernizat ion
in
Indian languages.
This openness to Sanskrit is not shared by Tamil, and as Annamalai (1979 ) and others
have pointed out, this
has to do
with attitudes
and
ideology. Although Tamil also
has a
considerable element of Sanskrit in its vocabulary, the trend in the past four decades or so
has been not only to avoid relying on Sanskrit but to replace the existing Sanskritic
expressions with new ly coined or revived Tamil equivalents (See An nam alai 197 9, Sh anm u-
gam 1975 ) . This tendency has been consciously adopted to assert a separate Tamil (or
Dravidian) identity,
to
resist
the
alleged "cultural imperialism"
of the
Aryan North,
and to
free th e
language
from th e
domination
of the
Brahmins ,
w ho
were,
of
course,
th e
guardians
and champions of the Sanskrit tradition. Hence, the alternative strategy for language moder-
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nization adopted by Tamil sets it apart from the other regional languages, which are
mo dernizing prim arily through San skritization. In the case of some other Indian languages
(e.g. Sindhi, Kashmiri , Urdu), the preferred source for lexical enrichment has
been
Perso-
Arabic,
rather than Sanskrit, and this has to do with the closer cultural ties of the speakers
with Islam
or
with Urdu-speakers .
The choice of sources for modernization also depends on the register, medium, and
style.
In the
sports register,
fo r
example,
the
norm
is to
rely almost exclusively
on
borrowing
from
English, while
in the
register
of
literary criticism, political science,
and
such humanities
and social sciences subjects, the tendency is to rely on either borrowings
from
Sanskrit, or
creation of new terms from Sanskrit roots. English is the major donor in modernizing the
language of science and technology in general, as
well
as the language of informal conversa-
tion
in urban centers. Similarly, modernization using English is much more prevalent in
spoken,
informal discussions, while
th e
formal, written
styles
attempt
to
draw
on the
native
or classical sources wherever possible. This is, of course, consistent with the relatively
conservative
nature of writing as opposed to speech. Even in writing, newspapers are more
open
to
English, while (the Government controlled) radio
and
television news broadcasts
use
a more Sanskritized
style.
This is also the case in text books and reference works employing
glossaries prepared by academic commissions. In short, formal, establishment language tends
to
follow a more nationalistic, conservative mod ernizing strategy, while the informa l language
freely
uses English (See also D'Souza 1986).
5 MICRO STRATEGIES IN LANGUA GE DEV ELOPMENT: M ECHANISMS OF
LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT AND THEIR EVALUATION
By "micro-strategies"
I
mean choices internal
to the
grammar
and
vocabulary
of the
language, such
as
choice
of
derivational processes, transference
of functions
performed
by
given
syntactic structures,
and so on.
First,
I will briefly
discuss some
of the
recurrent types
of mechanism employed in lexical expansion. The goal is not so much to add yet another
taxonomy
to the
many that exist
in the
l i terature (D'Souza 1986, Shastri 1986, among others);
but to
make explicit
th e
considerat ions
in the
choice
of one
process over another.
The
problem with
creating new
words
for new
concepts
is
that
often th e
newly coined
expression
is as
obscure
as the
foreign term. Thus,
the
advantage gained
in
national pride
an d ease of pronuncia t ion is often offset by the non-communicat ive character of the expres-
sions employed. Yet, many languages (e.g., Hindi, Tamil), have followed this route, depen-
ding on the
context
and
familiarity brought
by
usage
to
overcome
the
strangeness
of the
coinage.
Borrowi ng on the
other hand,
is
resisted
on
several grounds.
It is
felt that
to
borrow
a
term
is to
admit
the
inadequacy
of
one's
own
language (and
its
resources), although
it is often
poin ted o ut that ma ny of the develo ped languages of the world (e.g., English) enriched their
vocabulary by a "shameless" resort to borrowing. Borrowing from certain sources are resisted
more than others (e.g. exorcision of Perso-Arabic vocabulary
from
Turkish), and multilingual
communi t ies usually
follow differential
preferences to alternative sources for words, e.g.
Spanish
vs.
English
in Filipino;
English
vs.
Sanskrit
in Tamil, among
many examples) .
Borrowing
is helped by the presence of bilinguals in the community who can act as a bridge
in
the
transitional stage while
a new
word
is
being assimilated. Many languages, notably
Japanese, have relied on
borrowing w i t h assimilat ion
to meet the lexical needs. And this is
true
of the
Indian languages
as
well.
A
combination
of
bor rowing
and
creation
is hybridiza-
t ion, where a borrowed term is combined with a native derivational affix, e.g., serudara
'share
holder'.
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A
common device found in
Indian
languages is to fill a lexical gap with a borrowing
while compensating for its opaqueness by creating what may be called explicatory com-
pounds . Here, a borrowed word such as cancer is followed by a noun denoting the super-
ordinate
semantic category to which it belongs, in this case,
roga 'disease'.
The reader gets at
least a rough
idea
of what is
being
talked about. The examples are legion: rai lu
g a d i
'rail
cart', aspirin
m a t r e ,
'aspirin tablet', kr i smas habba 'Christmas festival' , Savapariksha tantra 'corp-
se
examination
procedure'
(=
autopsy), etc.
Modernization increases a language's dependence on compound ing in more than one
way. Often, a foreign technical concept is hard to translate into a single word, and one is
forced to use a compound, or even a syntactic phrase. For example, the Kannada word for
sympos ium is vicar a sank i r ana 'thought confrontat ion' ,
epidemic
is s ankram ika roga, and so on.
The other way in which compounds proliferate is when the donor language is itself
rich
in compounds, as in the case of English. In
coining
equivalens, the
recipient
languages
often resort to caiques or loan translations, as, for example, in
sveta
patra 'white paper', sita
qul le 'cold
sore', etc. A danger with calquing, as indeed in all translations, is that when the
original
itself
is a
non-compositional, idiomatic expression,
as
with
whi te paper in the
sense
of
a governmental disclosure,
the
caique,
not
having
the
support
of the
convention, becomes
doubly opaque.
In the
case
of
Indian languages, what
is
interesting
is
that even processes
of
creating
native equivalents have relied heavily on Sanskrit. This poses no problems when the
elements in question
have
been completely nativized in the regional language and are no
longer — or
barely— recognizeable
as coming from Sanskrit. For example, there are literally
thousands of words in everyday use, such as santosa 'happiness', m a n us y a 'man', which are so
much a part of Kannada that speakers are hardly aware of their Sanskrit origin. In a very
large number of cases
—perhaps
the
majority—
however, and specially in creating equivalents
of technical terms, the reliance on Sanskrit has been extremely heavy (see Srivastava and
Kalra,
1984;
Verma,
1984, and the articles in Krishnamurti and Mukher j i ,
1984) .
This resort
to Sanskrit is partly motivated by the desire to achieve
Pan-Indianness,
but this is overstated.
Due to centuries of semantic
shift,
many Sanskrit words have developed divergent meanings
in
di f ferent
languages
and
hence,
the
presence
of the
same Sanskrit words
in a
number
of
languages does not guarantee pan-Indian intelligibility. For example, upanya:s in Hindi is a
novel , in Kannada it is a lecture; and so on. Thus, Sanskritization has added to the
comprehension problem.
This
strategy, therefore, has been of more emotional value
— in
giving the creators of the terms the satisfaction of avoiding borrowings from a non-Indian
language— than
of
practical utility. This classicization
is
characteristic
of all the
regional
languages of India and stands as a major barrier to comprehension for the uninitiated reader.
It
is more prevalent in some registers —e.g., poetics— than in others, but is nevertheless qui te
pervasive.
Going back to the cultivation of native resources, another strategy often employed in
lexical expansion
is reinterpretat ion of
existing words
to
give them
a
specialized meaning
in
the modern context. Thus the term for
'touching'
sonku is now used in the sense of 'infection',
'naming ceremony' n a m a k a r a n a in the sense of nomination, akas avan i
'voice
from
the sky' in
the sense of
'radio'
and so on.
These
have easily caught on and the works of authors who
rely on this strategy are more readable than those of the self-conscious neologists.
Given the alternative strategies of coining, reinterpretation, calquing, borrowing,
hybri-
dization, and classical calquing (among others), the choice among them seems to be governed
by a complex set of considerations. Authors and translators seem (unconsciously or cons-
ciously) to
follow
one or the other strategy depending on what might be called their
philosophy o f
language development
an d subjective notions of
efficacy,
but unfortunately, there is
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no
principled theory
of
lexical development which would provide principled motivat ions
fo r
choosing one micro-strategy over another, especially in light of the effect of the choices on
th e communicat ive efficiency of the resulting language. The empirical study of the intelligibi-
lity of various strategies of modernizat ion is an area of research with great potential.
6
EFFECTS OF MODE RNIZATION ON LANGUA GE
I will now turn to a brief discussion of the effects of modernizat ion on the developing
language, both
in its
structural
and
stylistic aspects.
The first and
most obvious
effect, of
course,
is the quantum expansion in the size and range of vocabulary —especially in its
coverage of diverse registers and development of new differentiations. This is achieved by
both
an
increased exploitation
of
derivat ional
processes (dormant rules get reactivated) and by
the
addition
of
n ew derivat ional
processes ,
e.g.,
by
treating
the first or
second element
of a
compound
as a
derivational affix;
or by
structural borrowing, i .e., borrowing
of the affixes
themselves from a donor language. In Kannada, thousands of new words have been created,
using Sanskrit roots/stems
and
derivational processes.
A s a
result,
at
least
a
part
of the
Sanskri t derivat ional morphology has now become part of the educated Kannada speaker 's
word
formation component. Some scholars who disagree with this assertion argue that the
so-called neo-S anskri t ic vocabulary m erely represents borrowings from Sanskri t . However,
this is not the case, because these new w ords nev er existed in Sanskrit; and the c reators of
such words often have
had no
access
to
Sanskri t education
—they are
often monolingual
Kannada speakers. Thus lexical modernization based
on a
classical language
can
lead
to
coexisting morphological systems.
Second, development of the lexicon based on borrowings
from
various sources leads
to the existence of mult iple levels o f lexical s tructure differentiated on formal grounds. In
Kannada, for example, there are native Dravidian words, Sanskrit borrowings,
Perso-Arabic
borrowings, Hindi , Marathi and English borrowings. Loans from these sources have been
assimilated to different extents, as seen in the way phonological rules do or do not apply to
the
different classes
of
words.
For
instance, most Sanskri t words that
end in -a
have been
assimilated,
to become -e ending words: katha 'kathe', rekha 'rekhe',
sabha
'sabhe', etc.
The Perso-Arabic loans
from
this category undergo assimilation to an intermediate degree,
and have to be marked lexically for the assimilation rule, e.g., galla> galle; f a n a = f a n a ,
nasa > nase, etc. The English borrowing s with -a, how ever, never undergo assimilat ion. Thus
kyamara
(ca m era), gorilla, etc., are always pronounced with a final a. An adequate descript ion
of
the language, therefore, has to make the rules sensitive to the source of the borrowings.
Lexical expansion
due to
modernizat ion sometimes
also
strenghens word classes that
may not have had a large membership to begin
with.
This has hap pen ed with the class of
adjectives in
Kannada, which
is
mostly populated with words from Sanskrit
and
English.
(Especially Sanskrit participles).
Of course, large-scale borrowings from other languages
affect
the phonotact ics of the
language
as
well . Kannada
now
has,
but
previously
did not
have
-a final and -o final
words,
/f/ ,
/z/,
/z/ and
/a/
and
other sounds
(at
least
in
educated speech),
and of
course, aspiration
due to the t remendous influx of Sanskrit words (this last, of course, is not a recent develop-
ment ,
but one
that reinforces
an
ongoing process).
At
th e
level
of
com pounding,
one of the
most dramat ic effects
has
been
th e
abandon-
men t of the restriction on hybrid compounds, the a r i samasa
('compounding
of foes') according
to
classical Kannada grammarians. Whether
or not
this restriction operated
in
practice
or it
was, as is more likely, merely a prescriptive injunction is not clear. What is clear is that
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modernization
has
created
so
many thousands
of
such hybrids
as
rai lu g a d i rail-cart (for
train, the
first
element English and the second Perso-Arabic) that such an injunction would
be inconceivable today.
Also of
importance
is the
proliferation
of
s tem co m po un d i n g based
on the
Sanskrit
model, e.g., bhadrata i takhe
'department of security'
(where
th e
first element
is not an
independent word in Kannada), while the preferred structure of Kannada compound involves
tw o full words. Although this type of compound is used extremely widely, there seems to be
a certain amount of instability associated with such forms, as attested by variants such as
patr ika helike, patr ikeya
helike,
patrike helike all meaning 'press statement'.
On the
syntactic level,
the effect of
modernization
is
harder
to
state with certainty,
because detailed studies of the syntax of old and middle Kannada are not available.
Nevertheless, based on impressionistic accounts, the fol lowing observations may be made.
First
of
all,
the
passive construction
is
undoubtedly
a
product
of
modernization.
It was
for
a long time considered unnatural in Kannada (and Dravidian languages) but there is no
doubt that it is very
f requent
in both the news media and formal writing. The Kannada
passive is clearly modelled on its Sanskrit and English counterparts. However, passive
without
overt agents
are
more
f requent
than those with agents.
Perhaps because
of the
awkwardness
of
producing agent-ful passives
in
Kannada,
construct ion suited to agent suppression has come greatly into vogue. This is what I have
termed the impersonal construction
in
Kannada
in an
earlier paper (Sridhar, 1979). Here,
the
underlying
agent cannot
appear on the surface, an object occurs sentence
initially,
and
the verb
has an
u nm arke d , i.e.,
3rd
singular neuter agreement feature. This
is
also extremely
f requent
in newspaper reporting and in fact, this is more frequent in the language generally
than
the regular passive.
Besides
the
agent-down playing structures, modernization
has
also
in
general increa-
se d the
length
and
complexity
of the
sentences. Different types
of
complement structures
have been introduced, especially for reported speech. For example, ge ru nd ive complementa-
tion, where the verb of the complement (or reported) clause is
turned
into a
gerund
and the
complementizer agi is used. Incidentally, the increased use of reported speech in newspaper
writings has led to the foregrounding of the complement clause (as the new information) in
th e
sentence initial position, affecting
the
normal word order. Also,
the old
Kannada strategy
of expressing coordination through participles is relied on heavily, especially the present
perfect participle, which gives news its immediacy and continuity at the same time. Finally,
th e internal structure of the noun phrases has become much more complex with the use of
what may be called a nominal style. These are only some of the more obvious syntactic
changes
resulting from modernization.
The
topic
has
hardly been researched.
Modernization, especially when it involves large scale borrowing, can also lead to the
emergence of style strata and mixed bilingual or bivarietal codes. From the earlier discussion
of
the
sharp division between classicization
and
indigenization
it is
obvious that modernizing
communities tend to develop several styles of the new language, depending on the author's
preferences
for
sources
of
development. Thus,
all
modern Indian languages have
a
highly
Sanskritized style (preferred
by
those involved
in
standarization) which
is
removed from
the
informal styles; they also have an Englishized style, used in academic and semi-professional
discussions;
and of course,
pure
styles. The heavy concentration of borrowed elements, not
only
single lexical elements but entire phrases, sentences, sequences of sentences, etc.,
distinguishes
this language type (referred to as code-mixing , see Kachru and Sridhar
( 1 9 7 8 ) , Sridhar ( 1 9 7 8 ) , among others) from ordinary borrowing. Thus, modernization in
highly multilingual populations seems also to have th e
effect
of creating new levels of style
differentiation
and
mixed bilingual
codes.
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7 ON LUSION
I have discussed th e case of Kannada at great length although I have hardly
scratched the
surface
of the topic) because it seems to vividly illustrate a number of issues
involved
in
language modernization.
On the one
hand, there
are
those issues
of
language
politics
and language attitudes which determine th e choice of macro strategies, i.e., th e choice
of language
to
serve
as the
primary source
for
lexical development.
On the
other hand, there
are the less studied but, to my mind at least, more important issues of the impact of moderni-
zation (especially
exoglossic modernization)
on the
structure
of the
language,
in
terms
of its
productive morphological processes, stratification of co-existing phonological and morpholo-
gical systems,
and
extension
of
syntactic
and
rhetorical devices. Intimately involved
in all
this
is
the
issue
of the
intelligibility
and
comprehensibility
of the
product
of
modernization
— an
aspect of language communication sadly neglected by linguists. B y exploring these issues
with
reference to a concrete situation, I hope I have raised issues and described strategies
which
have significant implications for Basque in the present crucial period of its history.
NOTES
1 )
This paper is a preliminary progress report on an on-going project on language modernization in
Kannada. It is based in part on the fieldwork I conducted in Karnataka, India, as a Senior Research Fellow of the
American Institute of Indian Studies during
1988-84
and while I was on Sabbatical leave in Mysore, during
1 9 8 6 - 8 7 . I am grateful to the AIIS
(and
especially, Pradeep Mehendiratta) and to the State University of New York,
Stony Brook, for their support. I would like to record my special gratitude to E. Annamalai,
Juan
Cobarrubias, Braj
Kachru , Bh. Krishnamurti, and D. P. Pattanayak fo r their helpful comments and suggestions. Preliminary results
of
this project were presented
at the
Symposium
on
Language Modernization
at the
University
of
Illinois,
at a
colloquium at the Department of Linguistics, Osmania University, and as a S.S. Malawada Endowment Lecture at
Bangalore Universi ty. I am grateful to the audiences on these occasions fo r their contribution to the discussions. A ll
errors that remain are, of course, my own.
(2 ) This is not entirely correct, at least in Kannada. See, for example, th e llth century prose classic,
Voddaradhane , as well as the prose of the
C a m p u
works, and the Vacanas of the
12th-13th
centuries. However, there
is
no
doubt that poetry
was the
preferred mode,
and
that prose
was not
well-cultivated until
the
late 19th century
in most of the languages in question see Sridhar, 1984).
(3) Thus, a large number of words that
appear
to be part an d parcel of
Kannada,
such as a j j a . 'grandfather',
rakta 'blood', san te 'weekly village market', and so on are borrowings from Sanskrit and
Prakrit.