Mother tongue activism and language shift in multilingual India: Marathi in Pune, Maharashtra

Abstract

This article outlines the extracurricular work of education and language revitalization by two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Pune, a city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. It demonstrates how these NGOs respond to anxieties and fears of language shift, language death, and social change in ways that fill a gap in how connections of language to society are addressed in the formal education system in Pune. These NGOs recreate structures of hierarchies among socioeconomic classes in their work of language preservation, assigning to lower classes the task of maintaining Marathi as an everyday language and delegating the promotion of Marathi “high culture” forms such as the arts to the upper classes. The article illuminates ways in which Marathi use and language ideologies shape socioeconomic class identifications and how ideologies about language and language use take different forms based on needs defined through a socioeconomic class lens.

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