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

S. KULKARNI
not by the less-privileged groups, but by a high status group to mark its
identity in opposition to the contending elite group. Thus, a social
psychological explanation for the differential linguistic acculturation of the
non-Brahmin groups observed in the Pune study can be obtained in Le Page
and Tabouret-Keller’s third constraint on linguistic shift (1985:184-5):
positive and negative motivation to identify with groups. In using the
standard dialect features less frequently the Marathas are carrying out an ‘act
of identity’.
The contemporary Indian situation compares with the Hungarian case
reported by Kontra (1992, cf. Chambers 1995, 2 nd edition 1997:54-5). Since
independence there has been in India a constant growth in the number of
socially under-privileged people gaining access to education and, through it,
a means to social mobility. Similarly, with the communist take-over in
Hungary in 1948 the new government policy “pushed working class children
into higher education” and parents employed by the government received
generous aid as long as the children were at school. The linguistic outcome
of the large influx of the lower class into the middle class was the incursion
of non-standard features into the standard language. Kontra explains the
phenomenon thus: “[the] power structure made it possible for members of
the communist political and economic elite to retain their vernacular nonstandard
speech ... When they came to power, they may have changed some
of their habits or their clothing, but there was no linguistic threshold to
cross”. Clearly the social forces at work in urban Pune are of a different
nature: the pressure to standardise speech is great despite the large numerical
majority of the non-Brahmin population.
The second hypothesis formulated in section 3.2.3 was concerned with
the role of social class in the observed variation in the children’s speech.
Most western urban sociolinguistic surveys involving adult informants
report a clear link between a speaker’s language and his or her position in a
social class hierarchy (Labov 1966 and 1972; Wolfram 1969; Trudgill 1974;
Macaulay 1976). Adolescents in the west, though, appear to be less
influenced by parents’ social status in their speech habits and are reported to
conform more to norms of the local peer-culture (Cheshire 1982; Eckert
1988 and 2000). Adolescent speech in urban Pune showed a strong
correlation with father’s occupational status as was demonstrated by four of
the eleven linguistic variables included in the study. It is difficult to say
whether the reason for these divergent findings are the socio-cultural
differences or the different age groups of the children in the Pune study and
of those in Eckert’s study (most of the informants in Cheshire’s Reading
study, though, were aged between nine and thirteen). Wolfram (1969) in the
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