User:Zuggernaut/Marathi

Content relevant to Deshastha Brahmin Marathi language dispute at Talk:Maharashtra



4.4 STANDARDIZATION

There is general agreement on the essential nature of language standardization. The development of standard Marathi is characterized by the following socio-linguistic stages :

1 . One of the dialects, namely, Pune variety was superposed on others.

2. It was a medium of discourse in education to begin with

3. Then it served as the voice of the entire speech community

4. It spread with the growth of literacy

5. For the whole century, it was used by the literate bilinguals, mainly in writing but also gradually in speech.

6. It was closely developed under the influence of English with minimum of inter-mixture from other dialects.

Thus the prospective and literate nature of the Marathi standard is the natural consequence of the peculiar course of its development. Standardization of Marathi is also the linguistic corollary of modernization of society. Linguists have defined the characteristics of standard language as efficiency, economy, rationality, adequacy, clarity, commonality, acceptability and aesthetics. The experiments carried out by the standard variety, under the influence of elite bilingualism, formed the permanent writing habits of monolinguals at the successive stages. Change in the standard thus became part of the historical development of the language. The borrowed features together with the native features constituted themselves into norms. Since most writers of the nineteenth century belonged to a few urban castes in Bombay and Pune, standardization in Marathi was comparatively speedy.



The rise of great towns is another important factor involved in standardization. The cities of Bombay and Pune grew as centres of learning where the upper castes dominated. As there were no political-communal conflicts, there was no social destruction to vitiate the smooth progress of prose movement from natural course of development. The register of the upper class bilinguals became ascription. The shift in the centre of literary activity from Bombay, where several communities participated, to Pune where only one major Brahman community dominated was a change extremely favourable to the growth of the standard. The language of Pune Brahmans was accepted as standard. Nearly all the school teachers belonged to particular Brahman castes and were educated in Pune and Bombay. After their training in ' Normal schools' they were posted at district places in rural Maharashtra. These teachers wielded their urban stylistic clout and imposed their register on the language of the new generation. As nearly all the new prose was produced by bilingual writers imitation of the excellence of great writers led to imitation of their idiom. In short, the situation was ideal for the growth of period style, because the fixed writer-reader relationship helped quick acceptance of the norms. Of all the borrowings, loan translations are seen playing a greater role in standardizing the structural system of Marathi. As the available resources of Marathi were inadequate to the sciences, where language had to be used as a precise instrument, loans from the vanishing supraglossia were taken as substitutes to Enlgish terms. As a result there was a lexical subsystem of Sanskrit words in Marathi. The translators also established a new syntactic subsystem. A role similar to that of translators was played by grammarians. The first problem they faced was which variety was to be taken as standard for description. This they solved by adopting the speech of Deshastha Brahmans of Pune. They applied grammatical systems derived from English and Sanskrit to Marathi.

 Another important gain is the new norms of writing system are established according to English compositional norms. The pronunciation of Deshastha Brahmans of Pune gains prominence over other dialects owing to the standardized script universally in the prose works of this phase. However, the Bombay community consisting of several other communities still maintains its hold on the language. ‘Konkanism’ is fairly noticeable. The Nagari script replaces the Modi and the characters of the script, except a few consonants conjuncts, are fully standardized.