Scripting a new identity: The battle for Devanagari in nineteenth century India

Ahmad, Rizwan

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2007.06.005

Cited by 22 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…They share a common spoken form, often termed Hindustani, which is believed to have evolved through a commingling of local dialects with Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit and Persian influences during the Mughal period of Indian history (Kachru, 2008). Notwithstanding their construction as socioculturally distinct languages (Ahmad, 2008) and the slight differences between them in phonemic inventory (Kelkar, 1968), Hindi and Urdu share a common syntactic structure, morphology, and lexicon.…”

Section: Testing the Odh Using Hindi And Urdumentioning

confidence: 99%

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

et al. 2010

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Two primed naming experiments tested the orthographic depth hypothesis in skilled biliterate readers of Hindi and Urdu. These languages are very similar on the spoken level but differ greatly in script; Hindi is a highly transparent script, whereas Urdu is more opaque. It was accordingly hypothesized that formbased priming would be greater for Hindi than Urdu, reflecting greater reliance on a phonological assembly route in the more transparent Hindi script. Proficient Hindi/ Urdu biliterate readers were presented with primes either in Hindi or Urdu script (Exp. 1), or in Roman transcription (Exp. 2), while targets were always in blocks of Hindi or Urdu. Across both experiments, form-based priming was observed only in Hindi. Additionally, target words were named significantly faster and better in Hindi than in Urdu. The results are taken as support for the hypothesis of differential reliance on phonological assembly as a function of script transparency. Further, the greater graphemic complexity of Urdu script relative to Hindi appears to have contributed to slower and less accurate overall single word reading for Urdu than Hindi, despite the fact that Urdu was the first learned script.

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Section: Testing the Odh Using Hindi And Urdumentioning

confidence: 99%

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

et al. 2010

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“…During the British era, as various nationalist and ethnic movements in South Asia adopted language as a symbol of their identity, linguistic issues gained political complexity. An example of such linguistic symbolism is the affiliation of Hindi and Urdu with Hinduism and Islam, respectively (Ahmed 2008; Bhatt and Mahboob 2008). This affiliation has resulted in rendering the two dissimilar.…”

Section: English In Pakistanmentioning

confidence: 99%

English as an Islamic language: a case study of Pakistani English

Mahboob

2009

World Englishes

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In this paper we will explore the nature of English as it is used in one Muslim country and argue that, far from being a colonizing language, English used in Pakistan reflects Islamic values and embodies South Asian Islamic sensitivities. Through analysis of the current discourses on the politics of the English language and a study of Pakistani English, a framework is developed that can be used to study the relationship between Islam and English in other contexts.

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“…Studies like Ahmad () and Zhang () demonstrate how iconic linkages are forged between linguistic forms and social groups. But how do these linkages travel and spread within a community?…”

Section: Iconization and Recontextualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Iconization of Simplified Chinese

Wong

2016

J Linguistic Anthropol

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Although iconization is widely recognized as a crucial process through which linguistic differences are accorded social significance, we know little about how iconic linkages travel across time and space. This article highlights the processual nature of iconization and reveals recontextualization as an important mechanism for the transformation of indexical signs into icons. Focusing on a well‐known poem that purportedly encapsulates the defects of the simplified Chinese script used in mainland China, this study shows how its recontextualization in Hong Kong's print and social media between 2000 and 2015 helped construct simplified Chinese as defective and map its “defects” onto mainlanders.

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Scripting a new identity: The battle for Devanagari in nineteenth century India

Cited by 22 publications

References 4 publications

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

English as an Islamic language: a case study of Pakistani English

On the Iconization of Simplified Chinese

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