Language Modernization - Structural and Sociolinguistic Aspects S. N. Sridhar

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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



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

351



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

5



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)) .

5



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

54



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-

355



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'.

56



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

857



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

358



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.

359



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.

Language Modernization - Structural and Sociolinguistic Aspects S. N. Sridhar

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