Hal Schiffman led the Institute session, "Languages and the Uses of Literacy In the Indian Ocean," by introducing two key topics. First, was a discussion on the written languages in the Indian Ocean region: Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindu and Arabic. Schiffman concentrated on Sanskrit, Urdu and Hindu but left Arabic to Brian Spooner who is a specialist in that language. A particular issue was how Sanskrit became a language for government but not for religion. In fact, Hindu gradually became important in religious matters perhaps of its appeal to the Brahmins who used it in the Hindu religion. As the Hindu religion expanded over Deccan region so did Hindu. But it was halted by the Tamil in the Cola state of Srilanka (Ceylon) where for nationalistic reasons the people have consistently rejected Hinduism as a language and religion. Urdu developed later with the rise of Islam and became a language used by many muslims in India.

The second topic concerns another way to look at language in the Indian Ocean world, pidgin and Creole languages. Understanding aspects of both illuminate issues of power and cultural capital. Schiffman suggests consulting his Website—Pidgin and Creole Languages—for definitions and origin theories.

BA

Brian Spooner suggests that a number of stories may be used to illustrate some of the more interesting facets of the linguistic situation in the Indian Ocean.

• They concern the lingua franca phenomenon of the Levant (Haeberl), the migration of the Arabic word "qand" through Persian and other languages of South Asia into colonial French, ending up as candy in American English, and the spread of the idea of the left hand as the non-eating hand (Emeneau).
• Further illustrations may be summarized under the headings of "koine" (the use of languages of literacy as the language of elite interaction of broad areas, as happened with Persian in Central and South Asia), Sanskritization (the tendency for people to make consistent efforts to move up the social scale (Srinivas), veracularization (the historical tendency, especially over the past two centuries, for local languages to be standardized in written form as national languages), and convergence (the tendency over time in areas like the Indian Ocean for multilingualism to generate parallel structural development in genetically unrelated languages, producing a definable linguistic as well as cultural area, cf. Emeneau, Massica).

Throughout these processes one can observe continuing change in the relationship between spoken and written language use, and the alphabetization of hitherto unwritten languages.

In the Indian Ocean these phenomena have identifiably distinct histories in each of four functionally distinct arenas: the courts of grand and petty rulers, the Islamicate religious establishment of the madrasa, the bazar or urban market sea-traffic.

It is also possible to distinguish two periods, which I would call pre-and post-neonationalism (in order to distinguish the nationalistic phenomena of the Indian Ocean, especially after 1947, from the earlier nationalist movements of the Western world.

Within this analytical framework it is useful to look at pidgins, Creoles and diglossia in relation to Arabic, Baluchi, Gujarati, Persian, Swahili, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English.

Reading list:

Home | Bose | Spodek | Wilkinson | Watson | Spooner | Alpers
Pinto-Orton | Margariti | Brancaccio | Behrendt | Nichols| Nair
Schiffman |Omar | Askew | Muller | Lees | Cassanelli
Bowman | Heston | Hagerty

Harold F. Schiffman

Professor of Dravidian Linguistics and Culture

University of Pennsylvania

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