Language in South Asia

Language in South Asia is a collection of twenty-six articles distributed (albeit unevenly) among ten sections: (1) language, history, families, and typology; (2) languages and their functions; (3) Sanskrit and traditions of language study; (4) multilingualism, contact, and convergence; (5) orality, literacy, and writing systems; (6) language conflicts; (7) language and modernization; (8) language and discourse; (9) language and identity; (10) languages in diaspora. The individual articles are of uniformly high quality, and the volume achieves a marked degree of comprehensiveness, a remarkable achievement given (as we learn from this collection) the breadth of South Asian languages (some 320 different languages in four dominant families; p. 33), the depth of India's linguistic history (much of which is oral and not written, thus presenting its own unique problems), and the complex sociolinguistic interactions (polite and familiar forms of address, bilingualism, and so forth) that are a well-known characteristic of the Subcontinent....