Chapter 5 - Contacts, Cosmopoleis, Colonial Legacies: Interconnected Language Histories

Summary

Abstract

The linguistic landscapes of Monsoon Asia have been connected for millennia. One notable example of language contact is the elite adoption of Sanskrit in the first centuries CE, accompanied by processes of cultural, epigraphic, and religious convergence. Other languages, such as Pali, Tamil, Malay, Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, played important roles too. Speech communities continued to influence each other under European colonialism and these contact legacies still inform post-colonial language policies across the region. Analytically, premodern networks have often been examined through the idea of a cosmopolis. Historical linguistics and transregional philology can add further substance to our understanding of Monsoon Asia and its prolonged interconnections, providing a much-needed counterweight to hypernationalism and disingenuous ethnoreligious identity claims.

Keywords: language history; Indian Ocean; inter-ethnic contact; cosmopolis

Language, Area Studies, Monsoon Asia

The history of the region defined in this volume as “Monsoon Asia” and by others as “Southern Asia” took shape over two millennia of interethnic contact. This chapter aims to survey the linguistic consequences of these interactions and illustrate how language can help us reconstruct and understand the nature of historical encounters between different communities. As both South and Southeast Asia have been approached as separate analytical units in most twentieth-century Area Studies departments, examining their interconnected linguistic landscapes comes with benefits as well as challenges. This chapter explores the relevance of Monsoon Asia from the perspective of language history. It begins by tracing the adoption across much of South and Southeast Asia of Sanskrit as a vehicle of cosmopolitan thought, discussing some of the models proposed for this remarkable socio-political development. Other link-languages, such as Arabic, Persian, and Malay, are discussed as well. Attention is then given to the more mundane dimensions of contact across the Bay of Bengal, including trade, technological transfer, and maritime networks. Historical linguistics, a field that examines the development of and contacts between languages through time, can add texture and detail to these interactions between South and Southeast Asia. Under European colonialism, sizeable and often forced migrations across Monsoon Asia (and beyond) gave rise to new instances of language contact. These historically significant events continue to inform how communities in the region position themselves and their languages in relation to others.