Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION AND CHANGE IN URBAN INDIA
Brahmin cluster produced the most striking patterns, especially for the
middle class children of Scheduled and Backward caste groups. That is to
say, the lexicon of the non-Brahmin adolescents in Pune is undergoing a
gradual change from vernacular to standard lexical forms, a change which is
accelerated by middle class membership (the inference of change here is,
however, tentative; see footnote 5). Kerswill (1987: 34) refers to this type of
lexical differentiation as ‘lexical standardisation’.
It must be noted that the composite lexical variable in the Pune study
includes only commonly occurring content and function words. The
composite variable excludes kinship terms (and address forms) which
constitute a special component of the lexicon. Kinship, along with colour,
religion and taboo terms forms closed lexical systems of a language’s
lexicon. Studies in South Asian anthropology/ethnographic semantics have
been heavily oriented towards kinship studies (Shapiro and Schiffman 1981:
224-38 provide a comprehensive summary). Karve (1965, 1970),
Southworth and Daswani (1974), Dumont (1953) and Tyler (1964), to list
only a few of them, deal with the nature of the relationship between the
system of kinship terms and culture and other forms of cultural behaviour.
Generally speaking, caste groups are distinct in their ritual and social
practices and therefore this part of the lexicon has been reported to reflect
caste lines most clearly. It becomes necessary to mention here that the same
may be true in urban Pune, especially among working class children of the
Scheduled caste group.
A rapid round of questions was included in the first component of the
interview with the children in order to ‘warm them up’. One such question
pertained to kinship terms. The questions were often uncomplicated, eg:
what is your mother’s brother’s sister to you?, the expected answer being
/mame bJhiT/ (approximate translation = cousin sister). It was therefore
bewildering when some of the boys answered /bajko/ (= wife/). To give
another example, when I asked AG and SB (both 13 year old Scheduled
caste boys from working class families) in separate interviews, what is your
mother’s brother’s son to you, both answered without any hesitation
/mheKna/ (= brother-in-law) whereas the expected answer in standard
Marathi would be /mame bhau/ (approximate translation = cousin brother).
That these answers are in fact not ‘mistakes’ becomes evident when we
consider the cultural practices of some caste groups where cross-cousins are
the preferred marriage partners (mother’s brother’s daughter for the boy and
father’s sister’s son for the girls). This explains the answer ‘wife’ above. In
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