Language and Society in South Asia is the first major attempt to assess the impact of this new literature. It contains a biblio graphic survey of the major literature on the sociolinguistics of South Asian languages. It exposits the methodological and theoretical assumptions of sciolinguistic descriptions of South Asian languages, and contrasts them with the assumptions of earlier characterizations of these languages. An important feature of this book is its detailed examination of numerous schools of linguistic analysis within which most past descriptive work on South Asian languages has been carried out. This is done in language accessible both to the professional linguist and to non-linguists interested in social aspects of language use in South Asia.

Among the topics treated in this book are traditional taxonomies of South Asian languages, South Asia as a linguistic area, social dialectology, bi and multilingualism in South Asia, pidginization, creolization, and South Asian English, ethnographic semantics, and the ethnography of speaking. The work also contains an extensive bibliography of the scholarly literature pertinent to the study of South Asian languages in then social contexts.

Michael C. Shapiro is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle (USA). He is the author of many studies of Hindi linguistics. grammar and Indo-Aryan Harold F. Schiffman is Professor of Dravidian Languages and Linguistics at the University of Washington in Seattle (USA). He is the author of Intermediate Tamil: A Self- Instructional Method, A Grammar of Spoken Tamil, A Reference Grammar of Spoken Kannada, Dravidian Phonological Systems (with Carol East man), as well as numerous articles on Tamil and other Dravidian languages.

The following work is a modest attempt to present an overview of linguistic diversity in South Asia, and to place this diversity in a cultural context. The work is largely bibliographic, and tries to describe the current state of knowledge concerning socially conditioned language variation on the subcontinent. The literature on such variation is large and continually growing. Regrettably, it has been impossible to include much recent literature within the scope of this study. We have tried, however, to state what we consider to be the major issues involved in a number of aspects of sociolinguistic diversity in South Asia, to discuss the major literature extant that pertains to these aspects, and to state fruitful areas for future research.

Given the huge scope of this work it was inevitable that much of the material covered would be out of the academic specialization of either or both of the authors. A division of labor was therefore necessary. Chapters 1, 2, and 4, as well as sections 3.0, 3.3. 3.4, 8.0 and 8.2, were written by Michael C. Shapiro, whereas chapters 5, 6, and 7, as well as sections 3.1, 3.2, and 8.1 were written by Harold H. Schiffman.

Taking material from a large number of sources, we naturally encountered problems in abbreviations and transliterations. In general, we have not altered the transliterations given in direct quotations. We have, how- ever, tried to standardize transliterations used in the body of the text. It has not, in any case, been possible to fully standardize even these transliterations. Abbreviations have generally not been changed in quotations, and should be clear from context. Abbreviations in the text, except where noted to the contrary are as given in the chart following this preface.

South Asia is an area of staggering linguistic diversity. In the roughly 1,700,000 square miles of the area, (incorporating India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan), are to be found languages and dialects spoken by roughly one-quarter of the world's population and re- presenting at least five major language families and sub-families-Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Iranian. By general consensus each of these groupings encompasses many mutually unintelligible "independent languages," the names of which are in turn convenient labels for sets of mutually intelligible or unintelligible "dialects." This plethora of linguistic codes is further complicated by an array of orthographic systems, themselves of diverse palaeographic origins. The widespread diffusion of these writing systems into different areas and their adoption by heterogeneous groups to represent different codes has led to definitional questions about what constitutes a language and how languages relate to orthographic systems. As might be expected, such confusion has complicated the description of language distribution in South Asia.