Language Ideologies across Political, Historical, and Social Contexts in South Asia
Abstract
This current study seeks to expand on a sociolinguistic process that is highly understudied, and to which little attention has been paid. Language planning and policy in Nepal between the standard language, Nepali, and other minority languages require significant scholarly attention.
To this, I have drawn on abduction theory to elicit information from historical records, current processes implemented to separate the two languages, Nepali as a standard language, and Newari as a binary opposite and minority language, and from agents contributing to these tensions. I have found four clusters of bodies that affect these tensions: the top-down cluster, the bottom-up cluster, the mediating horizontally-placed cluster, and the super top-down and super bottom-up clusters. These bodies together all contribute to the maintenance of the tensions between the standard language, which in the case of Nepal is Nepali, and the minority and subjugated language, which in this study I have selected to be the Newari language.
Keywords: Nepali, Newari, language planning and policy, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, South Asia