Standards of english in South Asia

Abstract

The geographical designation ‘South Asia’ is now generally used to refer collectively to the following seven states (in order of population size): India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Maldives. ‘South Asia’ as a cover term replaces the ‘Indian subcontinent’, a term closely linked to the area's colonial heritage and still widely used in typological studies, but no longer an accurate reflection of the areag's contemporary political demarcations. However, the former ‘Indian subcontinent’ comprising what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, still forms the core of the modern notion ‘South Asia’ when it comes to the role of English: ‘Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka were never part of India and are at the very limits of the concept of a South Asian “subcontinent”’ (McArthur 2003: 309). It was, after all, British colonialism directed at the Indian subcontinent which in its wake fostered the irrevocable establishment of English in the region's linguistic ecology. The common colonial history of the region ended in 1947, when ‘British India’ gained its independence and partition created the two states of India and Pakistan. The former East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1972, and both Pakistan and Bangladesh have, in order to assert their sovereignty and national identity, pursued policies of restricting the domains of use of English (see Ayres 2003, McArthur 2003: 326-8). Despite contemporary differences in official language policy among the individual South Asian countries, Ferguson (1996: 36) maintains that ‘the sociolinguistic profile of English is strikingly similar in all the nations of South Asia in spite of differences in historical and functional details’. He refers specifically to the function of English as intranational link language and as a ‘neutral’ language due to the ‘relative lack of religious identification’ (1996: 37), to the importance of English as a language of government, administration, the law and education. If we continue to think of the contemporary South Asian states in terms of prototypes, with the three successor states to the ‘British Raj’ as core members of the category, then it is surely India that emerges as the most prototypical category member with respect to an emerging South Asian standard of English.