Certain combinations of languages and scripts have come to take on indexical properties within the world of advertising in northern India. Such properties are regimented by what is on offer—commercial items, government services and information, schooling, and coaching services. An exploration of changing conventions in advertising since the 1990s, a period of accelerated liberalization in India, reveals that there have been especially dramatic changes in education and coaching services. By considering combinations of language and script as partly constitutive of the voice of an institution, this article accounts for the changing possibilities for the articulation of institutional distinctions and the ways institutional voices commoditize aspects of personae during the last twenty-five years or so in northern India.

A critical examination of the findings of Valentine (1985, 1986), studies devoted to cross-sex communication in Hindi and Indian English, is shown to reveal that the assumptions of the models on which such descriptions are based are not only nonexplanatory but also untenable. They fail because they ignore hierarchical power. Their failure “abroad” must be seen as an invitation to reflect on their alleged success back home. (Discourse, discourse strategies, cross-sex communication, Hindi, Indian English, English, sociolinguistics)

Though many previous studies have reported enhanced cognitive control in bilinguals, few have investigated if such control is modulated by language proficiency. Here, we examined the inhibitory control of high and low proficient Hindi–English bilinguals on an oculomotor Stroop task. Subjects were asked to make a saccade as fast as possible towards the appropriate colour patch among competitors and distractors suppressing an eye movement evoked by the meaning of the word. High proficient bilinguals quickly oriented their attention towards the correct colour patch while effectively controlling the Stroop interference compared with low proficient subjects, on both colour and direction words. High proficient bilinguals also had fewer saccadic errors and demonstrated overall faster saccadic latency on all trial types. The results provide strong evidence for enhanced oculomotor control in proficient bilinguals compared with the less proficient ones.

The variety described here is Standard Hindi used in everyday casual speech by educated speakers in cities such as Varanasi, Lucknow, Delhi, etc. Although there are a few differences in pronunciation among speakers of these cities, the differences are minimal. The transcription is based on a recording of a female third generation speaker of Standard Hindi who grew up mostly in Uttar Pradesh before moving to Delhi. For a detailed analysis of Hindi segments see Dixit (1963) and Ohala (1983).

The individual works of Hariścandra in prose, poetry and drama have been little analysed or exploited by western scholars for the light they throw on social and political attitudes, and on language issues, in north India in their author's time. Yet many of these works are of interest from the above point of view. One such work is an essay based on an address given by Hariścandra in the town of Ballia, to the east of Banaras, in 1877. In the following pages the content of this interesting essay is outlined and analysed; an introductory account is first provided of Hariścandra, his activity, and its historical context.

This study provides a fragment of a contrastive analysis of written texts from Hindi and English. Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language used in South Asia in several varieties by approximately three hundred million people. It is one of the four major world language in terms of number of speakers. In this study, I present a number of sample texts from Hindi, both of the narrative and the expository kind, and discuss them in the theoretical frameworks of contemporary discourse analysis.

Pre-nineteenth-century prose and prose fiction in Hindi dialects. It is well known that the use of Sanskritized prose in Hindi dialects dates from long before the beginning of the 19th century A.D. The pre-19th-century prose texts which have been preserved in Braj Bhāṣā, Khaṛi Bolī, and Rājasthānī dialects have a collective importance for our subject as antecedents of the Sanskritized style of standard Hindi, based on Khaṛī Bolī, which emerged in the 19th century. Their existence demonstrates that before this time there were already recognized traditions of prose-writing in the main western Hindi dialects, and that within these traditions it was customary to use Sanskrit words to supplement the vocabulary of one's dialect, and to work in the Devanāgarī script.

There was a prevailing opinion in English linguistic literature that the modern prose Hindī, High Hindī, or Kharī bolī, was invented by the English.

This point of view was maintained some time ago by such a highly authoritative scholar as Sir G. A. Grierson. Thus, in the preface to his work on the history of Hindī literature he says : “ The first half of the nineteenth century … was the period of the birth of the Hindī language, invented by the English, and first used as a vehicle of literary prose composition in 1803 under Gilchrist‘s tuition, by Lallū Jī Lāl, the author of the Prem Sāgar.”

It is difficult to write correctly about the grammar of a language; it is almost impossible to be accurate about its pronunciation. It follows that the weakest and most unsatisfactory part of books on a language is nearly always that which deals with sounds. The reasons are various. I give some of them here with special reference to Urdu and Hindi.

In the specimens of non-tone languages given in the current reprint (1967) of The Principles of the International Phonetic Association, prosodic features are rather inadequately dealt with; stress is usually mentioned, but intonation never. The North Indian languages presented there suffer in this way: stress in Bengali is discussed briefly, and some reading conventions are given, but for Hindustani (Urdu) and Oriya stress is simply described as ‘weak and variable’ and is not marked in the texts. Intonation is not discussed at all. This means, in effect, that a learner without direct assistance from a native speaker will be likely, if he attempts to read these specimens aloud, to use the intonation patterns of his mother tongue—to read with English intonation, or French intonation, and so on. We shall not be the first to observe that any attempt to pronounce a foreign language with unacceptable intonation patterns will not succeed, no matter how well articulated the consonant and vowel segments may be.

Some ten years ago a Brahman scholar was travelling by rail from Jaunpur to Allahabad. At a country station there was an incident familiar in those parts: a number of women crowded the platform, weeping and bidding farewell to their men-folk, who were going to Calcutta to find work. Two or three of the women got into the carriage with their husbands, and, as the journey continued, began a, song. One line of this made a great impression on the Pandit. “The railway, my rival, has carried away my beloved.” A bold metaphor. In the poetry to which he was accustomed, the rival wife with her interference would be compared to the swan with its mythical power of dividing milk from water. But, after all, was not the railway simile much more natural and vigorous ? The swan simile was part of the stock in trade of centuries of poets, and required a special education and tradition for its understanding. The railway simile spoke from the heart to the heart.