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After a long time, some language related articles. It is no secret how powers that be have often tried to control the nature of public discourse by introducing new words for old ways and substituting neutral sounding words for words having negative connotations. As it turns out, they are often successful, thus giving little credibility to the famous Shakespearian adage of what's in a name. In this piece on India Together , Shripad Dharmadhikary points out the changing language of development debate in India. Irrespective of which side of the fence you are on, it makes sense to know the tricks of the trade. And if you ever doubted the power of sentence restructuring, perhaps this will convince you otherwise. How should we think about our farmer's? PS: This post is 201st post on Basket Case. It took almost 3.5 years which would mean on average 1 post per week, though as usual that statistics hides more than it reveals :-)

This is the long promised article only edition. This one comes from Pakistan, lamenting the bad condition of Madarsa education . Pakistan again, this time a view in favor of the recent step of making English compulsory . Sounds very much like the recent argument of Prasad about English for Dalits. Continuing on the common thread of Urdu, condition of Urdu press in India is not something to brag about. There is hardly a Urdu news paper that commands a voice at national level or even in a sufficiently big region. Moreover, it works both ways. While Urdu papers carry mostly Muslim centric perspective of problems, Hindi press lacks it to a large extent. Here is an attempt to start a Hindi paper with a Muslim perspective . Not sure why this article is called " Hegemony of Hindi " and it is not even well written but it notes an interesting point about mother tongue reporting in census data. Read with a grain of salt. Marathi or Kokani ? As the article says ; India is home to extra...

This dose of LangDig is going to be a pretty big one, owing in part to my extended vacation and in part to the accumulating bits from every edition. I have tried to organize the clips in categories so that they are easy to follow. Some of these stories are now around 1 month old but better late then never ! Also it is broken in two parts, this one being news and the second one being of general articles. Political : Let us start by looking at the reactions to the Marathi being compulsory in all the schools. CBSE is not amused . IBN tries to carry out a debate over the recent spat of make-compulsory steps taken in Karnataka and Maharashtra and when Congress has done it, can Bala Saheb be far behind ? Taking a clue from the neighbors, Andhra Govt is considering making sign boards in Telugu compulsory . In a function organized to award Gidugu Smaraka Puraksaram-2006 to C Dharma Rao , who has done lot of work to bring up Telugu, Andhra Pradesh CM said that they will push harder to get cla...

Sorry for the long delay but somethings in life just cannot wait and semester end seems to be rather full of them. but back we are and here we go. Madras HC sees little use for Tamil without proper infrastructure being in place. This is in responce to Govt's move to make Tamil as the court language. In the education field, Kannada and Marathi are now compulsory in their respective states for 10th and 12th standard kids. It is not very clear is this is for state boards only or for ICSE and CBSE also. In Kashmir also, efforts are on to introduce Kashmiri in the private schools . Urdu medium schools in Delhi are not able to find Urdu speaking Science and Maths teachers and so students are having problems. Central Institute for English and Foreign Languages has been accorded University status . I hope now the research section on their website will come out of being " under construction ". After schools, it is sign boards in Karnataka . The national association of the Deaf...

Let us start by 3 statements all coming from different conflict zones, typical of the role languages play in such scenarios. Manipur , Nepal and Kashmir . Taking forward the theme of conflict, here are some other effects of language antagonism: Asaam . In his new book, Subramanian Swamy asks Hindu's to vow to learn Sanskrit . Look towards the end of the review. And contrary to what I said, here is this blog post from Bangalore in which police refuses to help since the complainer was not able to speak Kannada . To bring back some cheer, efforts to promote languages: Bhutan and Konkani UT Austin launches Hindi-Urdu program and Cambridge recently closed its Sanskrit Dept. But academicians speak up for Sanskrit . Sindhi Language is doing fine and so is Dakhani in India. In Hindi Literature, translations are in vogue these days. On technology side, Tegic released predictive text for Hindi . To end, here is Pratap Bhanu Mehta on lessons from 1956 linguistic reorganization of states...

Let us start with a news that is a little old and was well covered in media for its absolute shock value. This is Chandra Bhan Prasad celebrating Lord Macaulay's B'day in Delhi . Here is a follow up post from Kafila . If we are able to get over the sheer recklessness of the whole thing, there are a lot of questions that demand a better answer than those being provided by Prasad and Co. . Recently, there have been two interesting stories from the legal system of the country. The first is the announcement by Karunanidhi to make Tamil the official language of Madras High Court . It is also covered here , here and here . This is a continuation of his other steps to promote Tamil in all spheres of life. Here is a op-ed in ToI . The second is a decision by the Calcutta High Court that a dying declaration can be used as an evidence if it is recorded in victim's mother tongue. Also covered here . Jharkhand announces introduction of tribal languages in schools . From Pakistan, mu...

Human Languages play a role so basic in our lives that most of the time we fail to even notice it. The only other thing of comparable importance might be economy, not the stock market and big corporations, but our personal financial state and activities. Together these two cover a vast spectrum of issues. On one hand stands linguistics, a scientific study of human languages, trying to under stand the current state of languages, how does human mind handle them, how do they develop and evolve and affect each other. Then we have the whole field of literature having authors, prose, poetry, translations, publishing. And then there are political issues, as Max WeinReich put it, " A language is a dialect with an army and navy. " Languages play an important role in defining today's nation states. They both unite and divide people like few other things. The catch the fancy of people like little else, just lookout for number of people lamenting death of Hindi and other vernacular l...