Dissertation Research: The "Revival" of Spoken Sanskrit in Modern India: An Ethnographic and Linguistic Study

这篇论文的研究项目是由芝加哥大学的一位文化人类学学生完成的，它将考察印度最近为促进和扩大口语“简单”梵语的使用所做的尝试。 虽然古典梵语一直得到当局的支持，作为学术和文学话语的媒介，但它最近被政治团体推广为未来的弗兰卡和一个特定印度教国家的象征。 通过对卡纳塔克邦的两个此类项目进行仔细的人种学和语言学研究，该项目将为语言消亡和复兴方面的文献作出贡献，卡纳塔克邦是班加罗尔的一个组织，提供课程并推广简单的梵语，该邦中部是一个模范“讲梵语的村庄”。方法包括一个正式的语言学分析的关系，梵语口语古典文学梵语;一个民族志研究如何在不同的语音社区的人获得这种新的语言能力，并检查生产的文本材料的语言的结构和使用。 这个项目将提供有关语言复兴的政治目标，这将是有价值的理论建设相比，如希伯来语和拉丁语的其他尝试的情况下，信息。 此外，该项目将有助于培养一名专业社会科学家，并增加我们对世界这一重要地区的了解。

This dissertation research project by a cultural anthropology student at the University of Chicago will examine recent attempts in India to promote and broaden the use of spoken `Simple` Sanskrit. While the classical Sanskrit language has been supported by authorities as a medium of scholarly and literary discourse, it recently has been promoted by political groups as a future lingua franca and emblem of a specifically Hindu nation. Through careful ethnographic and linguistic study of two such projects in Karnataka, an organization in Bangalore which gives classes and promotes simple Sanskrit, and a model `Sanskrit-speaking village` in the central part of the state, the project will contribute to the literature on language death and revival. Methods include a formal linguistic analysis of the relation of spoken Sanskrit to Classical literary Sanskrit; an ethnographic study of how people in different speech communities gain competence in this new language, and an examination of the production of textual materials on the language's structure and use. This project will provide information on a case of language revival for political goals that will be valuable for theory building when compared to other attempts such as Hebrew and Latin. In addition the project will contribute to training a professional social scientist and add to our knowledge of this important region of the world.