India's natural wealth, knowledge, arts and crafts have attracted foreigners throughout its long history. It has had continuous cultural contact and trade with other countries and, in all this, India has been exposed to many foreign languages such as Arabic, Bactrian, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Portuguese, Turkish and in a certain sense, Sanskrit. Each of these languages went through a cycle, rising to the position of power and prestige, and eventually declining and yielding place to yet another language. In this process, all these languages interacted with the native languages of India and exchanged sounds, words, sentences, idioms and expressions, sometimes even giving birth to new languages. Foreigners and Foreign Languages in India: A Sociolinguistic History tells the story of this long and continuous history of the advent, learning, use, demise and debris of some foreign languages in India.

The charged emotional politics of language and identity in India

"Victor Golla has been the leading scholar of California Indian languages for most of his professional life, and this book shows why. His ability to synthesize centuries of fieldwork and writings while bringing forward new ideas and fresh ways of looking at California’s famous linguistic diversity will make this the primary text for anyone interested in California languages."--Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley and author of How to Keep Your Language Alive “This book is a wonderful contribution that only Golla could have written. It is a perfect confluence of author and subject matter.”--Ives Goddard, Senior Linguist, Emeritus, Smithsonian Institution "Golla is a gifted polymath and California Indian Languages is certainly his landmark achievement, required reading for any linguist, archaeologist, ethnographer, or historian interested in aboriginal California."--Robert L. Bettinger, Professor of Anthropology, University of California Davis and author of Hunter-Gatherer Foraging "The preeminent figure in his field, Victor Golla has written a masterpiece filled with treasures for every audience: Indian communities working toward cultural and linguistic revival; general readers interested in the many cultures of Native California; and scholars in the fields of language, archaeology, and prehistory. The information here is so detailed that it supersedes all previous reference works."--Andrew Garrett, Professor of Linguistics, University of California Berkeley and Director, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages “This is a truly magnificent work, at once authoritative, comprehensive, accessible to a wide readership, and fascinating. Masterfully integrating linguistic, archaeological, historical, and cultural information, the author describes not just the languages, but also the major figures in the story: speakers, explorers, missionaries, and scholars. It is beautifully written, a great pleasure to read, and difficult to put down."--Marianne Mithun, author of The Languages of Native North America

Explores the ways linguistic nationalism has enabled and deepened the reach of All-India nationalism. This title is also available as Open Access.

At least a hundred indigenous Indian languages are known to have been spoken in Mesoamerica, but it is only in the past fifty years that many of them have been adequately described. Professor Suárez draws together this considerable mass of scholarship in a general survey that will provide an invaluable source of reference.

This comprehensive survey of indigenous languages of the New World introduces students and general readers to the mosaic of American Indian languages and cultures and offers an approach to grasping their subtleties. Authors Silver and Miller demonstrate the complexity and diversity of these languages while dispelling popular misconceptions. Their text reveals the linguistic richness of languages found throughout the Americas, emphasizing those located in the western United States and Mexico while drawing on a wide range of other examples from Canada to the Andes. It introduces readers to such varied aspects of communicating as directionals and counting systems, storytelling, expressive speech, Mexican Kickapoo whistle speech, and Plains sign language. The authors have included the basics of grammar and historical linguistics while emphasizing such issues as speech genres and other sociolinguistic issues and the relation between language and worldview. American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts is a comprehensive resource that will serve as a text in undergraduate and lower-level graduate courses on Native American languages and provide a useful reference for students of American Indian literature or general linguistics. It also introduces general readers interested in Native Americans to the amazing diversity and richness of indigenous American languages.

This book examines the evolution and journey of regional language television channels in India. The first of its kind, it looks at the coverage, uniqueness, ownership, and audiences of regional channels in 14 different languages across India, covering Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, Assamese, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Odia, Punjabi, and Malayalam. It brings together researchers, scholars, media professionals, and communication teachers to document and reflect on language as the site of culture, politics, market, and social representation. The volume discusses multiple media histories and their interlinkages from a subcontinental perspective by exploring the trajectories of regional language television through geographical boundaries, state, language, identities, and culture. It offers comparative analyses across regional language television channels and presents interpretive insights on television culture and commerce, contemporary challenges, mass media technology, and future relevance. Rich in empirical data, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of media studies, television studies, communication studies, sociology, political studies, language studies, regional studies, and South Asian studies. It will also be useful to professionals and industry bodies in television media and is broadcasting, journalists, and television channels.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Language of the Snakes traces the history of the Prakrit language as a literary phenomenon, starting from its cultivation in courts of the Deccan in the first centuries of the common era. Although little studied today, Prakrit was an important vector of the kavya movement and once joined Sanskrit at the apex of classical Indian literary culture. The opposition between Prakrit and Sanskrit was at the center of an enduring “language order” in India, a set of ways of thinking about, naming, classifying, representing, and ultimately using languages. As a language of classical literature that nevertheless retained its associations with more demotic language practices, Prakrit both embodies major cultural tensions—between high and low, transregional and regional, cosmopolitan and vernacular—and provides a unique perspective onto the history of literature and culture in South Asia.