Language and Linguistic States
To better contextualize the formation of linguistic states, let us first examine India's linguistic history.
There are 4-6 major language families in India, with the largest family being the Indo-Aryan languages, spoken by 75% of the population. Many of India's major official or scheduled languages belong to this family, including Hindi (41% of Indian population), Bengali (8.1%), Telugu (7.2%), Tamil (5.9%), Urdu (5.0%), and the two languages most relevant to this exhibit, Gujarati (4.5%) and Marathi (7.0%).
The diversity of India's languages, of which there are many more than the ones listed above, can be represented with a Greenberg Diversity Index of 0.914. This index means that two people randomly selected from the population will have a 91.4% chance of speaking different languages.
Part of the reason why India has so many languages is because the post-colonial India of today is a coalition of states that had been separate political entities for much of history. The idea of "India" as we know it is relatively new. Without a unifying force, different regions of India were able to develop and maintain their own linguistic traditions. Because written language was primarily employed for religious or governmental reasons, the development of language was intimately tied with the religious and political forces that united each geographical region.
Therefore, during colonial times but well before independence, the Indian People's Congress already began calling for the eventual establishment of linguistic states. For various reasons, this reorganization was only largely achieved between 1952 to 1960, not at the time of independence in 1947 as many as hoped. The following pages of this exhibit will explore this process in greater detail.
How, then, does urbanism affect language?
Cities are the places where different languages are most likely to come in contact with each other. Dialogue and discourse encouraged by travel and trade make cities a perfect setting for languages in flux to organically develop. As a result, many languages in India and elsewhere are considered to be "related," each seemingly a combination of different languages in the region. Moreover, each language often has one official version but multiple spoken dialects--Marathi, for example, has 42 dialects. On this spectrum of dialects, some are nearly identical aside from choice syntax and vocabulary, whereas others are almost mutually unintelligible.
Those are ways in which languages evolve to be more like their surrounding influences. But cities also serve to solidify and codify the distinctive features of a language. One way is by developing the written word, either by cultivating bodies of literature, or through the drafting and dissemination of official government texts. Official texts set a standard for the most proper form of the language, whereas literary works can employ different forms of a language, but in any case, the author's conscious and careful use of language lends the language integrity. Another way that the city can solidify language is through its education systems, by determining what language(s) are incorporated into the curriculum. Yet another way is through media representation. Looking at the language breakdown of major Bollywood films, it is evident that Marathi and Gujarati are more well-represented than their speakers are represented in the population, partly due to the strength of the film industry in Mumbai.