Advertising in the Periphery: Languages and Schools in a North Indian City

Type of Work

Article

Date

4-2002

Journal Title

Language in Society

Journal ISSN

0047-4045

Journal Volume

31

Journal Issue

2

First Page

213

Last Page

242

DOI

10.1017/S0047404501020164

Abstract

Written school advertising in Banaras, a North Indian city, creates correspondences between a language activity and central and peripheral places. In spoken discourse, complex relationships inhere between ways of describing languages as varieties and the sociological value that is said to exist in the fit between a language variety and its domain of use. Education is one such domain because the educational system itself is organized in popular discourse by medium, Hindi or English. In spoken discourse, Hindi- or English-medium schools can indicate central or peripheral dispositions. Advertising, however, includes a meaningful element unavailable to speakers in the flow of interaction – a distinction between lexical designation and its rendering in Devanagari or roman script. Therein lies its power to establish English as central and Hindi as peripheral.

Hamilton Areas of Study

Anthropology

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