The 'higher' status language does not always win: The fall of English in India and the rise of Hindi
| Autor: | De Silva, Kushani, Parshad, Rana D., Basheer, Aladeen, Antwi-Fordjour, Kwadwo, Beauregard, Matthew A., Chand, Vineeta |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| Popis: | Classical language dynamics explains language shift as a process in which speakers adopt a higher status language in lieu of a lower status language. This is well documented with English having out-competed languages such as Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Mandarin. The 1961-1991 Indian censuses report a sharp increase in Hindi/English Bilinguals, suggesting that English is on the rise in India - and is out-competing Hindi. However, the 1991 - 2011 data shows that Bilingual numbers have saturated, while Monolingual Hindi speakers continue to rise exponentially. To capture this counter-intuitive dynamic, we propose a novel language dynamics model of interaction between Monolingual Hindi speakers and Hindi/English Bilinguals, which captures the Indian census data of the last 50 years with near perfect accuracy, outperforming the best known language dynamics models from the literature. We thus provide a first example of a lower status language having out competed a higher status language. Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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