Language Attitudes of Urban Disadvantaged Female Students in India: An Ethnographic Approach

Abstract

This paper qualitatively documents and analyses the attitudes and identities of female students from the urban disadvantaged social class towards English and Hindi in the city of New Delhi. These attitudes include not only instrumental views of English but also the impression that it creates a new personality for an individual. English is part of the daily literacy practices of the students. It is a tool with which they access knowledge in higher education. Hindi is important for their identity; thus they make a distinction between ‘personality’ and ‘identity’. They see Hindi as a ‘national language’ linked with Hinduism and the composite culture of a diverse India when in fact this is not the case demographically or politically. The ideologies of status and solidarity are problematic and can be associated with both languages. The data for this ethnography, presented partially through photographic evidence, come from oral and written interviews conducted with 64 Grade 12 students in Hindi and English at the Rajkiya Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, a girls’ high school in a disadvantaged part of New Delhi, India.

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