Linguistic Imperialism: A Study of its Impact on the Assamese Language in the Greater Sivasagar District of Assam

Iftikar Ali Ahmed; Baishalee Rajkhowa; Arup Kumar Nath

doi:10.54392/ijll2322

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Home / Archives / Vol. 4 No. 2 (2023): Volume 4, Number 2, Year 2023 /

DOI: 10.54392/ijll2322

Linguistic Imperialism: A Study of its Impact on the Assamese Language in the Greater Sivasagar District of Assam

Iftikar Ali Ahmed⁺⁻
Baishalee Rajkhowa⁺⁻
Arup Kumar Nath⁺⁻

Department of English, The Assam Royal Global University, Guwahati-781035, India

Author Bio

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Iftikar Ali Ahmed

Iftikar Ali Ahmed is a research scholar in the Department of English, Royal School of Languages, The Assam Royal Global University, Guwahati, Assam, and India. He pursued his M.A. in Linguistics from Tezpur University, Assam, India. His thrust areas and research interests include Sociolinguistics, Language Endangerment, Linguistic Imperialism, Language Documentation, Language Maintenance, Language Revitalization and Language Morphology. The increased dominance of languages like English, Hindi and Bengali over the Assamese language led him to conduct this research on the Assamese language in the Greater Sivasagar district of Assam to study the present status scenario of the Assamese language from the language usage point of view.

Department of English, The Assam Royal Global University, Guwahati-781035, India

Author Bio

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Baishalee Rajkhowa

Baishalee Rajkhowa is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Royal School of Languages, The Assam Royal Global University, Assam, and India. Her research interests lie in the areas of Language Studies, Linguistics, English Language Teaching, and Interdisciplinary Studies. She has presented many papers in International Conferences and has published papers related to her field.

Department of Linguistics and Language Technology, Tezpur University, Assam-784028, India

Author Bio

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Arup Kumar Nath

Arup Kumar Nath is currently working as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Language Technology, Tezpur University, Assam. Dr Nath’s areas of interest include theoretical linguistics of Morphology, Language Typology, and Multilingualism, Indian Grammatical Tradition to applied linguistics such as Lexicography, Language Documentation, and Language Revitalization, etc. He has been teaching Linguistics to both Postgraduate and PhD students at Tezpur University, Assam since 2012 to till date. Dr Nath is also an awardee of the prestigious DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst: German Academic Exchange Service) Fellowship to carry out research works in Germany. Accordingly, he conducted collaborative research works at the University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany in 2014.

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Abstract

The state of Assam in India is the home to the people who speak Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language. Assamese is the native tongue of the people of Assam and the official language of the state of Assam. Based on linguistic standards and conventions, Assamese is a vital language for writing. However, when we attempt to see the language from the viewpoint of native speakers' attitudes towards the language, we find that the language is steadily deteriorating among the linguistic community. This deterioration is caused by Linguistic Imperialism. Linguistic Imperialism is a phenomenon in which a dominant language attempts to weaken other languages both socially and politically and in a theoretically founded way. The impact of the dominance is increasing day by day due to which a negative attitude has increased significantly among the native speakers of Assamese who considers English as superior to their mother tongue. Negative attitude is one of the reasons of language endangerment and we cannot deny the possibility of endangerment of the Assamese language in the far future if the dominance of English goes on increasing. History is evident that languages with a huge literature and population got extinct because of the reasons like negative attitude, dominance of other languages, decreasing rate of fluent native speakers, examples of such languages are Sanskrit, Hebrew, etc. This paper tries to analyse the negative attitude which is gradually increasing in the Assamese language and ways to strengthen it by reverting the dominance of Linguistic Imperialism by languages like English and Hindi.

Keywords

Linguistic Imperialism, Assamese Language, Language Endangerment, Language Community, Native Speakers, Negative Attitude,

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