Interestingly - People are so sensitive over these words.
I was casual while using those for 'Spoken Wikipedia for Indic Languages'
and request for participation was sent to all mailing lists.
There was debate about Indic vs Indian vs Dravidian on same Mailing list
about usage.
And strong resistance was shown by other mailing lists privately, and
surprisingly on open mailing lists people were open to Use 'F' word and
censored criticism - I was unaware of such strong issues. Its always good
to respect sentiments over language grouping name.
After many mails, As of now Project name is 'Spoken Wikipedia for Indian
but it will be interesting to know Indic/Indian/Dravidian usage to cover
broader languages.
It might be useful to use Asian Languages term to cover major languages.
Thanks for starting this conversation.
Keep Exploring, Keep Inspiring! :)
Best Regards,
Abhishek Suryawanshi,
On Behalf of Wikipedia Club Pune
On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Tejaswini Niranjana <teju(a)cscs.res.in>wrote;wrote:
Dear All,
Was the WMF brief for the India office limited to languages in India or
did it include South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal,
Bhutan, Maldives – and by some definitions Tibet and Afghanistan as well)?
According to what I could find online, the public announcement of WMF
specifies Hindi and 20 other Indian languages. As I’ve discussed with some
of you before, the term “Indic” could be problematic when used to refer to
contemporary languages, and I’m sure our South Asian neighbours will take
strong exception to their languages being given this description. The issue
isn't merely a philological one to do with the etymology of words, but has
extensive social and political ramifications, as we would all know from
different kinds of contexts.
If we’re presently intervening in generating content and increasing
editorship for languages used in India, we should perhaps be using the term
“Indian languages”. If we’re including languages that have a different
originating location geographically, like Nepali, we should say “South
Asian languages”. Of course there will be the problematic cases of Bangla,
Punjabi and Urdu which are spoken across borders. I heard from Wikipedia
users in Kolkata that the majority of Bangla wiki editors are from
Bangladesh. This was a casual remark and needs to be borne out by an actual
survey. It would be an interesting challenge to confront this problem
rather than avoid it.
Here’s a brief note on the Indic/Indian question:
*Indic:* a theoretical concept used to *refer to common characteristics*of the languages
falling in the family of languages native to India. Most
often the term 'Indic' means ''of Indian origin". This usage is in
line
with the assumptions of classical philology that Indian languages and
customs share a common root and origin. Such assumptions have either been
* challenged for their overwhelming homogeneity* or have become*theoretically less and
less useful
* over the years in understanding the growth of Indian culture and
society. At any rate, Indic in contemporary theoretical usage refers to
ancient and medieval historical texts and languages of the Indian
subcontinent and has an archaic ring to it.
*Indian Languages:* a term referring to all the languages which are in
use in India. Unlike the previous term, it doesn’t contain any hidden
theoretical or ideological assumptions and may be used to refer neutrally
to languages which have been in India for a considerable amount of time.
This usage may be more appropriate to Wikipedia’s NPOV position.
Eg., While there can be debate about whether Urdu is an Indic language,
there can be no controversy in stating that Urdu is an Indian language.
While Nepali and Sinhalese are definitely Indic languages owing to their
linguistic genealogy, we may choose to, or not choose to, term them as
Indian languages based on the geographical and political context we’re
referring to. [Here, I would strongly recommend using the term South Asian
languages - this usage is common in defining a disciplinary domain as well,
such as South Asian Studies. Famous university departments such as the SALC
at the University of Chicago explicitly use the term South Asian Languages
(and Civilizations, but that is another story).] By the way, South Indian
languages are technically speaking not 'Indic' at all, since they belong to
the Dravidian language family. We can't also forget that it is three South
Indian languages - Kannada, Tamil, Telugu - that are regarded as classical
languages in India.
Although there’s no clarity on exact usage of the terms, there’s a
general consensus about using Indic to refer to ancient and medieval texts.
For example, see,
Sheldon Pollock, *The Language of the Gods in the World of Men:
Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India* (Berkeley: Univ of
California Press, 2006).
The other point I want to add is that the term 'Indic' comes out of the
colonial and Indological approaches to the subcontinent. Indology is a
variant of Orientalism and has been criticised as such by Edward Said, in
*Orientalism* (New York: Vintage, 1978); see Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_%28book%29*. *There’s an
extensive critique of Indological translations in my book *Siting
Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context*(Berkeley: Univ of
California Press, 1992). For a recent discussion of
Indology, see also
http://www.himalmag.com/component/content/article/88-beyond-indology.html
.
It might be an interesting exercise to google ‘indic’ and then google
‘indian’, and see how the searches throw up quite dramatically different
things, and then add the word ‘languages’ to each search to see what shows
up.
I’m aware that the input format and text editor consoles use the term
“Indic”- so it is up to the team and the extended community to discuss this
and find an acceptable resolution.
Looking forward to the discussions on this topic.
Tejaswini
--
Tejaswini Niranjana, PhD
Lead Researcher - Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications
(HEIRA)
Senior Fellow - Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS)
Visiting Professor - Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)
Visiting Faculty - Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute
of Science (CCS-IISc)
t: 91-80-41202302
f: 91-80-26730722
http://heira.in
www.cscs.res.in
_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l