Study On Language Policy Of India

As a new field in linguistics, language planning and language policy is attracting moreand more attention from scholars in relative fields. Governments and academic institutes alsocontribute a lot in designing and implementing language policy. India is a country with manynations and languages. The complex situation of language distribution and use make it a verydifficult task for India to make language policies. To some extent, the research on Indianlanguage policy will open a window for us to learn about the social structure of India andunderstand India s social ideology. At the same time, it can serve as a reference for makinglanguage policy in China. This thesis has explored the evolvement of Indian language policyfrom a historical perspective and elaborated on the language policy in the colonial period andafter independence. Then it focuses on the Three Language Formula and finds out that thereare deep political reasons for the formation of the current language policy.In the colonial period, there were two different opinions as to the education in India.One opinion supports the study of Indian languages, which is Orientalism. The other supportsEnglish instruction, which is Anglicism. At the commencement of British rule, governorsadopted the Orientalists proposals to make it more easily to adjust to the local society. Theyencouraged the British officers to learn Indian language and culture, established schoolswhich taught Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, etc., and used local languages to disseminate westernculture. As British rule in India gradually stabilized, rulers began to support Anglicists to useEnglish as the language for education.After independence, the Indian government began to limit the use of English andstipulated in the Constitution that Hindi shall replace English in15years. However, thesouthern non Hindi-speaking states opposed the use of Hindi as the only official language,for they would be at a severe disadvantage compared with Hindi-speaking states in thatcircumstance. To ease the tensions, the Indian Congress passed the amended OfficialLanguage Law in1967, stipulating clearly that Hindi is the official language of the countryand English is the additional official language. Meanwhile, all the states agreed upon theThree Language Formula, stipulating that all the middle schools should teach English, Hindiand one regional language. In Hindi-speaking states, people should learn another Indian language or European language besides Hindi and English.Standard explanations for the Three Language Formula mainly focus on the specialattributes of Indian culture and history. Though reasonable to some extent, these explanationsare not so feasible when compared with some European countries. This thesis tries to explainit from two variables: the world historical time of state consolidation and the nature ofpolitician/bureaucrat relations for postcolonial states.