![]() Today, those who advocate that Hindi was created by colonial officers are deeply indebted to colonial thinking in this perception. Since the British discovered Vidyāpati only later, the young Grierson’s earnest efforts to grant an independent language status to Bihari (Maithili) in the 1870s were thwarted by the colonial administration arguing that dialects in Bihar lacked literature. One convenient way that the colonial officers used was that languages have literatures while dialects do not. Most people without a background in linguistics and especially sociolinguistics would be lost in how to distinguish language from dialect. Grierson tries to cut out a middle way by attributing both language and dialect status to Hindi. In Grierson’s use above, the word dialect would seem unclear as there is no standard above it.Ĭolonial thinkers for long did not acknowledge the existence of various vernacular languages in India and simply claimed that the language of India is Sanskrit or Persian and that there are numberless dialects. Is his Hindi language, a speech and then a dialect? In general usage, dialect normally means a local, lower form of language dependent on a higher, standard version. ![]() One can hear these qualifications for Hindi even today.Īlthough Grierson was a great early linguist and one of the best connoisseurs of Indian vernaculars, his concept of this new idiom lacks clarity. Yet, it is clear that he does not want to leave any doubt that Hindi is the gift of colonial administration to India and qualifies the three words used synonymously for language as hybrid, newly invented and artificial. ![]() Furthermore, the contents of his study contradicts his statement since The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan, just as its chief source, the Hindi Śhivsingh saroj (1877), presents a history in which modern Hindi is the culmination of a tradition that includes Avadhi, Brajbhasha and other literary idioms. In these two paragraphs, he calls it a language, a speech and then a dialect. Interestingly, the linguist Grierson’s ideas about what Hindi is are unclear. We can see that both the idea of colonial agency as well as the imagery of birth goes back at least to this early statement. Ts prose in one uniform artificial dialect, the mother tongue of no native born Indian, forced into acceptance by the prestige of its inventors, by the fact that the first books written in it were of a highly popular character, and because it found a sphere in which it was eminently useful. The result was practically a newly invented speech. In 1803, under Gilchrist’s tuition, Lallū Jī Lāl wrote the Prem Sāgar … with this peculiarity, that he used only nouns and particles of Indian, instead of those of Arabic or Persian origin. the birth of that wonderful hybrid language known to Europeans as Hindi and invented by them. Grierson’s The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan (1889, page 108, emphasis mine): However, the clearest formulation of the idea of the birth of a new language is the one found in Sir George A.
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