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

SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION AND CHANGE IN URBAN INDIA
Caste and Class:
Reassessing their significance in investigating
sociolinguistic variation and change in urban India
Sonal Kulkarni
Department of Linguistic Science, The University of Reading
Abstract. The principle of caste, which is said to distinguish south Asia from all other
societies, has gained much the same importance in social, political and academic
debate as class in Britain or race in the United States. Sociolinguistic studies in India
have been affected by the exclusive focus on caste as the as the basis of social
stratification in India and this had led investigators in the past to hold that static,
categorical ‘caste dialects’ existed in the sub-continent. Subsequently, attention was
shifted to the effects of education and urbanisation in levelling out caste influence.
However, the function of social class as a sociolinguistic leveller is not always clear.
This, I argue in the present paper, has often been the outcome of the inclination of
researchers to assume a direct correspondence between caste status and class status.
This paper discusses some findings from the sociolinguistic study of 125 school-aged
adolescents in the city of Pune. Quantitative analyses of the tape-recorded linguistic
data reveal that, in the process of linguistic acculturation, the emerging social class
system has variable influence on different traditional caste groups.
1. Introduction
In discussing mobility in different types of social organisation, researchers
routinely compare typical class systems in western industrial societies with
rigid, ‘immobile’ caste systems (Dumont 1970; Littlejohn 1972; Giddens
1989). The south Asian Hindu society, where social inequalities are believed
to be permanent and fixed, has commonly come to be regarded as an
archetype of the latter. Although instances of positional changes in the caste
order are well documented in the sociological literature on south Asia
(Srinivas 1966: 6; also see Gupta 1993 for a collection of essays)
misconceptions regarding mobility in the caste system are evident in recent
western sociolinguistic literature and are reflected in such unenlightening
comparisons as ‘a caste system is a class system with no social or
occupational mobility’ and ‘… class systems and caste systems appear to be
poles on a continuum’ (Chambers 1995, 2 nd edition 1997: 53). Within Indian
sociolinguistics too, the place of caste in the study of linguistic variation and
change has not always been clear. Following the immense interest generated
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