Hindi Language Impact

For my language papers in our Linguistic Anthropology class, I chose to study the Hindi language.  According to the Central Intelligence Agency page on India, “Hindi is the most widely spoken language and primary tongue of 41 percent of the people” (Central Intelligence Agency, 2016).  According to the Ethnologue’s webpage on India, Hindi is one of 447 “living” languages in India (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2016).  My first paper focused on basic facts of Hindi such as those mentioned above and the language’s role in Indian culture as a status symbol.  In the Encyclopedia Britannica article on the language, Hindi is called a “language of upward social mobility” (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2016).  This popular opinion is resulting in the loss of many regional languages, of which “young people now have only a passive knowledge” (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2016).

My second paper studied gender roles and their relation to the Hindi language and Indian culture.  I examined three articles about Hindi works relating to how men or women see themselves and their role in society through the language.  The first article was about historical women’s roles in India during British colonialization.  Charu Gupta portrays women as obedient to their husbands above all else (Gupta, 2015).  The second article details men’s sexuality in India through the study of detective novels.  Sanjay Srivastava indicates that these novels allowed the Indian man to explore his sexuality in a relatively safe way without a lot of judgement from others (Srivastava, 2013).  The third article I used in my paper examined how women were portrayed in Hindi textbooks.  The writers of these textbooks want Indian children to learn to respect women’s issues, which was studied by Mariola Offredi (Offredi, 2014).  All the articles showed a positive change toward gender roles in India.

References:

Central Intelligence Agency. (2016). India. In The World Factbook. Retrieved from: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (2016). Hindi Language. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hindi-language

Gupta, C. (2015). ‘Innocent’ Victims/‘Guilty’ Migrants: Hindi Public Sphere, Caste, and Indentured Women in Colonial North India. Modern Asian Studies, 49(5), 1345-1377. Retrieved from: http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.uwyo.edu/docview/1700933581?pq-origsite=summon

Lewis, M.P., Simons, G.F., Fennig, C.D. (eds.). (2016). India. Ethnologue: Languages of the             World. Retrieved from http://www.ethnologue.com/country/in

Offredi, M. (2014). Educating the Young against Discrimination: the Woman Issue in the Hindi Textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). Archiv Orientalni, 82(1), 59-111,200. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.uwyo.edu/docview/1536912354?pq-origsite=summon

Srivastava, S. (2013). Thrilling Affects: Sexuality, Masculinity, the City and ‘Indian Traditions’ in the Contemporary Hindi ‘Detective’ Novel. Interventions, 15(4), 567-585. Retrieved from: http://www.tandfonline.com.libproxy.uwyo.edu/doi/full/10.1080/1369801X.2013.849426?scroll=top&needAccess=true