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Advertising in the periphery: Languages and schools in a North Indian city

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2002

CHAISE LADOUSA
CHAISE LADOUSA
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056-1879, Ladouspc@muohio.edu
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Abstract

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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.

Keywords

Language politicsgenrelanguage communityadvertisingNorth India
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , April 2002 , pp. 213 - 242
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press