About us

Bharat, i.e., India, is a multilingual country since times before. Each section of the society, each region, language, artistic forms and styles, is a piece in a kaleidoscope and yet there is a unity in Indian cultural ethos underlying this plurality. A gigantic, imperceptible net holds the parts and the participants together in a totality that is clearly Bhartiyata (Indian-ness). Be it language or culture, it is like a planet in orbit: each rotates on its axis, but all revolves around the same Indian cultural ethos.

There is a long history of multilingualism, multiculturalism, expansion of language communities and changing patterns of sociolinguistic aspects in the region. Naturally, this situation gave rise to a unity in languages, cultures and ways of living in this landscape. This diversity in unity created the Indian cultural ethos like a rainbow with multiple colours that has a typical gestalt. Indian masses through sustained interaction and common legacies have developed a common way to interpret, to share experiences, to think. That, which has emerged, is a kind of organic plurality among the speakers of languages. Indian languages may have come to resemble one another as much as they do by virtue of the millennia of close cultural contact for which there is direct historical evidence as well as obvious manifestations in every sphere of life: religion, philosophy, music, cuisine, etc.

The earliest documentation of anthropological, economical and political traits of a civilisation within India is found in the Vedic compositions in the form of Vedas. The Vedas are a collection of religious hymns composed in an early form known as Vedic Sanskrit. It is clear from linguistic analyses of Vedic Sanskrit that the hymns were composed from 1500 to 1250 BCE. Though, the contents of Vedas were transmitted orally from one generation to another generation as part of their education for centuries before first being committed to writing. The language of the Vedas is thus an available resource to linguists for study. Later, various linguistic and cultural groups participated in this acculturation process and made the area unique in terms of language, culture and artistic forms. A groundwork for the study of contacts amongst various groups residing in close proximity and their linguistic and cultural convergences were thus laid.

A critical evaluation of the relationship between cultural and linguistic change within (and across) traditional civilizations is needed. Many linguists, generally, treat language as having an autonomy apart from culture. Yet they often introduce culture into their analyses. Although culture and language are theoretically distinct, they are empirically interrelated in highly complex ways. Linguistic change always takes place within a social and cultural context in which people interact with one another.

There are two types of linguistic classifications that are useful in the reconstruction and interpretation of culture history—the genetic and the areal-typological-diffusional. Most classificatory research by linguists, whether or not they are anthropologically oriented, has been of the genetic type. This is inadequate since, each of these types of classification provides different sorts of information, complementarily crucial in historical interpretation. Genetic classification reflects common identity and ancestry of disparate groups of people, original homeland and subsequent migrations, and aspects of earlier habitat and culture. Areal classification reflects contacts among groups of people and the nature of this contact. A valid linguistic history must reconstruct the interplay of the genetic and diffusional through time. For at least half a century there has been a general recognition that language and culture are conceptually distinct and not to be confused.

Work on India as a “language area” or “Sprachbund” dates back at least to Bloch (1934) but it was not until Emeneau (1956) that it reached a larger linguistic audience. Since then, an extensive literature on this topic has appeared, with different suggestions as to which features should be compared throughout the subcontinent and how to define these. A much earlier manifestation of this view is to be seen in the famous passage in Kumarila Bhatta’s mımansa text (Tantravarttika, about seventh century) in which he gives two or three examples of the way in which his contemporaries derived Tamil words from Sanskrit (e.g., pap, which probably represents the attributive form pappu of pampu [pambu] ‘snake’ is derived from Sanskrit papa- ‘sin, sinful’). It is clear that he represents the common type of a thinking that we have referred to and that is represented by Ma¯rkan» d» eya’s seventeenth century classification.

The purpose of this portal is to foster work on Bharat as a Linguistic Area, by bringing researchers from all theoretical and practical approaches together, to discuss their most recent work in this field, creating a forum for the exchange of ideas, methods and results among interested scholars, ranging from traditional historical linguistics and dialectology to computer-based statistical models.