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LANGUAGE MODERNIZATION:
STRUCTURAL AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS
S. N. SRIDHAR
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Department of Linguistics
NEW YORK - USA

INVITED PAPER

1.

INTRODUCTION

Language modernization has been defined, in a widely cited statement by Charles

Ferguson (1968) as
"the process by which (a language becomes) the equal of other developed
languages as a medium of communication; it is in a sense the process of
joining the world community of increasingly intertranslatable languages recognized as appropriate vehicles of modern forms of discourse".
Note that the criterion of success specified in this definition involves an external
reference point, "other developed languages", rather than a language (or culture) internal
one of, say, "serving as the adequate vehicle for the expression of the current ideas of its
speakers" (e.g. in the domain of computers), or an omnibus one, such as, "being able to
express the ideas of modern society". This exoglossic criterion, emphasized by the notion of
"intertranslatability" with developed languages, distinguishes the modernization of the languages of developing societies (such as the languages of Asia and Africa) and the less
developed languages of developed countries (such as Basque) from routine language change
characteristic of all languages.
The developing nations, as Rudolph and Rudolph (1972) have said, "directly import
advanced institutional structures which elsewhere emerged only after a long period of
scientific invention or experimentation". This "telescoping of development", as Das Gupta
(1976) has aptly called it, has meant that new concepts and expressions have flooded the
developing languages at a rate perhaps unprecedented even in the history of the now
developed laguages. In coping with the demands of development, the languages of the
developing nations (or developing languages, hereafter) have shown different "resource
preferences", ranging from a near-total reliance on indigenous resources (e.g. in the case of
Hungarian, and to a lesser extent, Tamil) to a rather heavy dependency on other languages
(e.g. Japanese, Kannada and others), as well as very interesting compromises in between. The
developing languages also, of course, differ in the linguistic processes employed in modernization and the effects of these processes on the structure of the language (on the lexical,
morphological, and syntactic levels), on the creation, maintenance, and neutralization of style
differences, and the sociolinguistic concomitants of these changes. Thus language modernization as a process is potentially of interest to a number of areas of linguistic research,
including descriptive and theoretical linguistics (with reference to, for example, word-formation
processes and their productivity, especially in the case of co-existing morphological systems),
historical linguistics (contact-induced versus spontaneous language change), sociolinguistics
(study of bilingualism, diglossia, dialect intelligibility, register-creation), and the sociology of
language (especially language attitudes regarding purism and pride, and language planning),
among others.
In this paper, my aim is to demonstrate the value of studying language modernization as an integrated process, with structural, stylistic, and sociolinguistic dimensions. In
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particular, I would like to show that an analysis of the considerations involved in the choice
of particular preferences and mechanisms for modernization provides insights into the dynamics of inter-lingual and inter-cultural relationships, especially in multilingual societies. Also,
the study of the effects of modernization on language structure and style can help us better
understand the functional bases of linguistic change and the emergence of style differences. I
shall illustrate the discussion with reference to the modernization of the languages of India,
especially Kannada.

2.

MODERNIZATION IN THE CONTEXT OF INDIAN LANGUAGES

Since the languages of India are at different stages of development, modernization

involves quite different needs depending on the language. In the case of the "unwritten"
languages, which are spoken by minority communities in different states, the urgent need is
that of devising writing systems. Another, perhaps more fundamental and antecedent need
for these languages is "legitimization", that is, recognition, both by the governments and by
the speakers themselves, of the use of these languages in institutional domains, such as
administration, education, mass media, and commerce.
In the case of the major regional languages which among them constitute the mother
tongues of more than 80 /o of India's population modernization involves not so much
graphization or legitimization as development of additional lexical, syntactic, and discourse
features, and standardization. It is these languages that I shall focus upon in the rest of
this paper.
In the 1971 Census of India, 1652 mother tongues were reported. 30 languages were
reported as the mother tongue of at least half a million persons each, and scores of others by
fewer speakers. Of these, the following are some of the more widely spoken languages (often
referred to as the major "regional" languages).
Table 1. The major languages of India
Assamese
Bengali
Gujarat!
Hindi
Kannada
Kashmiri
Malayalam

Marathi
Oriya
Panjabi
Sindhi
Tamil
Telugu
Urdu

Hindi, spoken by about 35-40 % of the population, is the country's official language, with
English serving as the associate official language for the near future at least.
It is a fact often overlooked that, important as Hindi and English are, it is primarily
these "regional languages" (Hindi, in its role as a regional language also belongs in this
group) that form the backbone of the nation these are the languages closest to the people
and therefore the primary focus of India's development and self-expression.
Despite a long history of literary cultivation (spanning over a thousand years, in the
case of languages like Tamil and Kannada), these languages are still in various stages of
development toward functioning as full-fledged "modern" languages in the sense of Ferguson's definition cited above. The major reason for this lag has been the fact that these
352

languages never got a chance to serve as media in the areas of education, administration,
law, science and technology, and international communication during the post-Renaissance
period when most of the languages of Europe became modernized. While the European
languages were acquiring modern registers, these languages remained confined to essentially
the areas of the "humanities", and thus were exponents of what Alisjahbana (1967b) calls in
a not particularly happy choice of terms "expressive" culture, as opposed to "progressive
culture".
Most of the regional languages mentioned above have been recognized as the official
language of the state(s) in which they are spoken by the majority of people. Yet, there is still
considerable dependence on English, in such domains as higher level administration, judiciary, and, especially, in higher education and research in the areas of science and technology. The states of India are moving toward the goal of replacing English with the regional
languages in all spheres of activity at the regional level, and with Hindi at the national (or
federal) level. It is in this context that the need for language modernization is felt to be a
pressing one, especially in the context of an egalitarian social system envisaged in the Indian
Constitution.
Krishnamurti (1984:97) has pointed out that these languages share certain "positive
and negative features of history with respect to language development:

"(1) They all have literary traditions of varying degrees of antiquity, ranging
from the early Christian era in the case of Tamil to the recent past in the
case of Panjabi and Sindhi.
(2) In all these languages, prose is of recent origin, developed under the
impact of the English language and the spread of mass media.
(3) They all have flexible, modern, standard varieties which are used as
vehicles of prose writing. There are differing degrees of distance between
the emerging standard and the other social/regional non-standard varieties.
(4) All of them (with, perhaps, the exception of Tamil) borrow freely from
Sanskrit as a learned language and each has imbibed, through sociopolitical contact, an element of Perso-Arabic vocabulary in the fields of
judiciary, revenue, and public administration.
(5) None of them had earlier possessed the concepts and expressions precisely suited to the political and economic systems that we have opted for
since becoming independent."

Krishnamurti goes on to say that "because of these shared features, there has not been much
difference either in the nature or degree of 'modernization'" which the major Indian
languages have achieved during the past fifty years or so" (ibid). In the light of these
observations, it is possible to get a fairly accurate picture of the problems and processes of
language modernization in India by studying the case of one of these major regional
languages. My data is drawn from Kannada, which is the majority and official language of
the South Indian state of Karnataka, and is spoken by about 30 million people. It is a
Dravidian language, with Subject-Object-Verb basic word order, agglutinating morphology,
and a continuous literary history going back to about the 9th century A.D. (For details
regarding the structure of the language, see Schiffman 1982, and Sridhar (forthcoming)).
353

3.

MACRO STRATEGIES IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT:

CHOICE OF DONOR LANGUAGE

A modernizing language, especially one with a complex history of bi- or multilingualism, is faced with a range of options with regard to the sources of lexical and other elements
needed for language development. This is what I would call the issue of "macro strategy" in
language development. At one theoretical extreme is an exclusive reliance on internal
resources (I shall call this strategy indigenization). At the other hypothetical extreme is
wholesale importation of linguistic devices and elements (I shall refer to this as cryptocreolizfltion). (I call the latter strategy crypto-creolization, rather than borrowing, simply to distinguish
the extreme nature of this hypothetical case from the more commonly encountereed cases of
borrowing). Most cases of modernization involve strategies that are intermediate between these
extremes, and in fact, often involve interesting compromises, as we shall see.
Of course, languages tend to vary in the degree to which they rely on indigenous or
foreign sources for lexical development. (Since lexical elements are the most salient elements
in the speakers' language awareness, I shall use that as a short hand for the entire gamut of
modernization strategies, including syntactic, rhetorical, and discourse strategies). Every language community seems to have a school of opinion which holds that (excessive) borrowing
dilutes the essential character of the language. This is the purist position (See Wexler 1974).
This attitude is often compounded by politico-cultural factors in communities with a history
of political or cultural domination by an external power: by relying on indigenous sources,
the developing language can assert its identity, even when the dominant language would
otherwise be the most natural (because the most familiar) source for borrowing. This argument carries a lot of weight in the case of languages which have been victims of attempted
suppression, persecution or discrimination, and which are attempting to define and assert
their cultural identity (like Basque and many Asian and African languages). Apart from these
cultural and political arguments, this indigenization strategy is also advocated on grounds of
efficiency and fairness as well: borrowing is criticized as elitist while creation from native
sources is held to be easier to understand the new language would be closer to the common
people. As Alisjahbana (1976) has observed, Bahasa Indonesia prefers coining to borrowing,
and if the latter strategy is used, the preferred sources are: an Indonesian language, Sanskrit,
Old Javanese, Arabic, or English, in that order.
It is worth noting that this strategy is considered ideal even by those language
communities which do not practise it. It is, apparently, good politics, though fraught with
difficulties when put into practice. The appeal of indigenization is based on an important
unstated assumption that is, in fact, often untenable. The assumption is that the material for
coining new words and expressions will come from contemporary varieties of the language.
In practice, indigenization often involves resorting to archaic or obsolete lexical stock, mainly
from Classical literature. Despite their native origin (even that is not always certain; they may
have been borrowed from some other sources at an earlier stage), and the phonotactic and
other structural advantages that follow from this consideration, these coinings are, in terms of
semantic transparency or naturalness, or familiarity to the potential users, no different from
potential borrowings and sometimes more opaque (because less familiar)! Thus, indigenization becomes, in effect, Classicization (see below).
In contrast to the position of the purists or nationalists, one also can identify an
equally well-articulated, though admittedly less idealistic or popular, position that I shall refer
to as the Pragmatist position. Here, the source of a word is considered irrelevant: what is
crucial is the test of usage if an expression is in current usage, it should be adopted; there is
no sense in replacing a familiar term with an unfamiliar one, merely for the sake of "purity".
The pragmatists are also concerned with supra-regional (e.g., Pan-Indian, Pan-Arab, PanEuropean, international, etc.) intelligibility or uniformity and see little merit in replacing
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internationally accepted or standardized terminology (in the sciences and technology, especially) with indigenous equivalents that are not necessarily intelligible even within the region
of the developing language.
In between these well-defined positions, there are a number of intermediate possibilities, of course. No language is an exclusively borrowing language, nor is any immune to
borrowing. Most developing languages attempt to "disguise" their borrowing with caiques, or
loan translations. In cultures with an established Classical tradition involving a prestige
language (such as Latin and Greek in Europe and Sanskrit in South Asia), there is a very
strong tendency to draw upon the lexical stock, and derivational resources, of the Classical
language, even when that language may not have been a widely spoken language for
centuries. I shall refer to this strategy as Neo-Classicizfltion. It is interesting to note that
neo-classicization strategy generally invites much less virulent opposition from the purists
than borrowing from a modern foreign language (or the former colonial language). This is
mainly because the Classical language is felt to be part of the indigenous tradition, while the
foreign donor language is perceived as a threat to the developing language's identity.

4.

SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXT AND CHOICE OF RESOURCES FOR

MODERNIZATION

In understanding the choice of resource resorted to by a language in modernizing

itself i.e., in opting for borrowing, or neo-Classicalization, or indigenization, the crucial
operating variable seems to be not so much the relative usefulness of the linguistic resources
available to the modernizing language as the sociolinguistic context in which modernization
takes place. The Indian languages are cases in point. Most of the major regional languages
whether they belong to the Indo-Aryan or Dravidian family have been quite open to
Sanskrit, English and Perso-Arabic, in that order, for developing their vocabularies. In the
case of the Indo-Aryan languages, of course, they are direct descendents of Sanskrit and
stand in the same relationship to it as the Romance languages do to Latin. It is, therefore, not
surprising that they should turn to the Classical stages of their parent language to create new
vocabulary. Even in the case of the Dravidian languages, as Burrow and Emeneau (1962)
point out in their Introduction to the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, there is a "tendency
for all four of the Dravidian literary languages in the south to make literary use of the total
Sanskrit lexicon indiscriminately (p. 1)". Of these languages, Malayalam seems to be the
most Sanskritized, Telugu and Kannada next, and Tamil the least Sanskritized. So many of
Sanskrit words have been used for so long in these languages, and in every register, not only
in the learned domains, that they have become an integral part of the vocabulary, even basic
vocabulary (see Sridhar 1974, 1981), and most native speakers are unaware of the Sanskritic
origin. In any written discourse, it would not be untypical to find anywhere from 50 %-80 %
of the words originally coming from Sanskrit. This intimate relationship with Sanskrit is an
important factor in the choice of resources for modernization in Indian languages.
This openness to Sanskrit is not shared by Tamil, and as Annamalai (1979) and others
have pointed out, this has to do with attitudes and ideology. Although Tamil also has a
considerable element of Sanskrit in its vocabulary, the trend in the past four decades or so
has been not only to avoid relying on Sanskrit but to replace the existing Sanskritic
expressions with newly coined or revived Tamil equivalents (See Annamalai 1979, Shanmugam 1975). This tendency has been consciously adopted to assert a separate Tamil (or
Dravidian) identity, to resist the alleged "cultural imperialism" of the Aryan North, and to
free the language from the domination of the Brahmins, who were, of course, the guardians
and champions of the Sanskrit tradition. Hence, the alternative strategy for language moder355

nization adopted by Tamil sets it apart from the other regional languages, which are
modernizing primarily through Sanskritization. In the case of some other Indian languages
(e.g. Sindhi, Kashmiri, Urdu), the preferred source for lexical enrichment has been PersoArabic, rather than Sanskrit, and this has to do with the closer cultural ties of the speakers
with Islam or with Urdu-speakers.
The choice of sources for modernization also depends on the register, medium, and
style. In the sports register, for example, the norm is to rely almost exclusively on borrowing
from English, while in the register of literary criticism, political science, and such humanities
and social sciences subjects, the tendency is to rely on either borrowings from Sanskrit, or
creation of new terms from Sanskrit roots. English is the major donor in modernizing the
language of science and technology in general, as well as the language of informal conversation in urban centers. Similarly, modernization using English is much more prevalent in
spoken, informal discussions, while the formal, written styles attempt to draw on the native
or classical sources wherever possible. This is, of course, consistent with the relatively
conservative nature of writing as opposed to speech. Even in writing, newspapers are more
open to English, while (the Government controlled) radio and television news broadcasts use
a more Sanskritized style. This is also the case in text books and reference works employing
glossaries prepared by academic commissions. In short, formal, establishment language tends
to follow a more nationalistic, conservative modernizing strategy, while the informal language
freely uses English (See also D'Souza 1986).

5.

MICRO STRATEGIES IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT: MECHANISMS OF

LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT AND THEIR EVALUATION

By "micro-strategies" I mean choices internal to the grammar and vocabulary of the

language, such as choice of derivational processes, transference of functions performed by
given syntactic structures, and so on. First, I will briefly discuss some of the recurrent types
of mechanism employed in lexical expansion. The goal is not so much to add yet another
taxonomy to the many that exist in the literature (D'Souza 1986, Shastri 1986, among others);
but to make explicit the considerations in the choice of one process over another.
The problem with creating new words for new concepts is that often the newly coined
expression is as obscure as the foreign term. Thus, the advantage gained in national pride
and ease of pronunciation is often offset by the non-communicative character of the expressions employed. Yet, many languages (e.g., Hindi, Tamil), have followed this route, depending on the context and familiarity brought by usage to overcome the strangeness of the
coinage.
Borrowing on the other hand, is resisted on several grounds. It is felt that to borrow a
term is to admit the inadequacy of one's own language (and its resources), although it is often
pointed out that many of the developed languages of the world (e.g., English) enriched their
vocabulary by a "shameless" resort to borrowing. Borrowing from certain sources are resisted
more than others (e.g. exorcision of Perso-Arabic vocabulary from Turkish), and multilingual
communities usually follow differential preferences to alternative sources for words, e.g.
Spanish vs. English in Filipino; English vs. Sanskrit in Tamil, among many examples).
Borrowing is helped by the presence of bilinguals in the community who can act as a bridge
in the transitional stage while a new word is being assimilated. Many languages, notably
Japanese, have relied on borrowing with assimilation to meet the lexical needs. And this is
true of the Indian languages as well. A combination of borrowing and creation is hybridization, where a borrowed term is combined with a native derivational affix, e.g., serudara
'share holder'.
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A common device found in Indian languages is to fill a lexical gap with a borrowing
while compensating for its opaqueness by creating what may be called "explicatory compounds". Here, a borrowed word such as cancer is followed by a noun denoting the superordinate semantic category to which it belongs, in this case, roga 'disease'. The reader gets at
least a rough idea of what is being talked about. The examples are legion: railu gadi 'rail
cart', aspirin matre, 'aspirin tablet', krismas habba 'Christmas festival', Savapariksha tantra 'corpse examination procedure' (= autopsy), etc.
Modernization increases a language's dependence on compounding in more than one
way. Often, a foreign technical concept is hard to translate into a single word, and one is
forced to use a compound, or even a syntactic phrase. For example, the Kannada word for
symposium is vicara sankirana 'thought confrontation', epidemic is sankramika roga, and so on.
The other way in which compounds proliferate is when the donor language is itself
rich in compounds, as in the case of English. In coining equivalens, the recipient languages
often resort to caiques or loan translations, as, for example, in sveta patra 'white paper', sita
qulle 'cold sore', etc. A danger with calquing, as indeed in all translations, is that when the
original itself is a non-compositional, idiomatic expression, as with white paper in the sense of
a governmental disclosure, the caique, not having the support of the convention, becomes
doubly opaque.
In the case of Indian languages, what is interesting is that even processes of creating
"native" equivalents have relied heavily on Sanskrit. This poses no problems when the
elements in question have been completely nativized in the regional language and are no
longer or barely recognizeable as coming from Sanskrit. For example, there are literally
thousands of words in everyday use, such as santosa 'happiness', manusya 'man', which are so
much a part of Kannada that speakers are hardly aware of their Sanskrit origin. In a very
large number of cases perhaps the majority however, and specially in creating equivalents
of technical terms, the reliance on Sanskrit has been extremely heavy (see Srivastava and
Kalra, 1984; Verma, 1984, and the articles in Krishnamurti and Mukherji, 1984). This resort
to Sanskrit is partly motivated by the desire to achieve Pan-Indianness, but this is overstated.
Due to centuries of semantic shift, many Sanskrit words have developed divergent meanings
in different languages and hence, the presence of the same Sanskrit words in a number of
languages does not guarantee pan-Indian intelligibility. For example, upanya:s in Hindi is a
novel, in Kannada it is a lecture; and so on. Thus, Sanskritization has added to the
comprehension problem. This strategy, therefore, has been of more emotional value in
giving the creators of the terms the satisfaction of avoiding borrowings from a non-Indian
language than of practical utility. This classicization is characteristic of all the regional
languages of India and stands as a major barrier to comprehension for the uninitiated reader.
It is more prevalent in some registers e.g., poetics than in others, but is nevertheless quite
pervasive.
Going back to the cultivation of native resources, another strategy often employed in
lexical expansion is reinterpretation of existing words to give them a specialized meaning in
the modern context. Thus the term for 'touching' sonku is now used in the sense of 'infection',
'naming ceremony' namakarana in the sense of nomination, akasavani 'voice from the sky' in
the sense of 'radio' and so on. These have easily caught on and the works of authors who
rely on this strategy are more readable than those of the self-conscious neologists.
Given the alternative strategies of coining, reinterpretation, calquing, borrowing, hybridization, and classical calquing (among others), the choice among them seems to be governed
by a complex set of considerations. Authors and translators seem (unconsciously or consciously) to follow one or the other strategy depending on what might be called their
philosophy of language development and subjective notions of efficacy, but unfortunately, there is
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no principled theory of lexical development which would provide principled motivations for
choosing one micro-strategy over another, especially in light of the effect of the choices on
the communicative efficiency of the resulting language. The empirical study of the intelligibility of various strategies of modernization is an area of research with great potential.

6.

EFFECTS OF MODERNIZATION ON LANGUAGE

I will now turn to a brief discussion of the effects of modernization on the developing
language, both in its structural and stylistic aspects. The first and most obvious effect, of
course, is the quantum expansion in the size and range of vocabulary especially in its
coverage of diverse registers and development of new differentiations. This is achieved by
both an increased exploitation of derivational processes (dormant rules get reactivated) and by
the addition of new derivational processes, e.g., by treating the first or second element of a
compound as a derivational affix; or by structural borrowing, i.e., borrowing of the affixes
themselves from a donor language. In Kannada, thousands of new words have been created,
using Sanskrit roots/stems and derivational processes. As a result, at least a part of the
Sanskrit derivational morphology has now become part of the educated Kannada speaker's
word formation component. Some scholars who disagree with this assertion argue that the
so-called neo-Sanskritic vocabulary merely represents "borrowings" from Sanskrit. However,
this is not the case, because these new words never existed in Sanskrit; and the creators of
such words often have had no access to Sanskrit education they are often monolingual
Kannada speakers. Thus lexical modernization based on a classical language can lead to
coexisting morphological systems.
Second, development of the lexicon based on borrowings from various sources leads
to the existence of multiple levels of lexical structure differentiated on formal grounds. In
Kannada, for example, there are native Dravidian words, Sanskrit borrowings, Perso-Arabic
borrowings, Hindi, Marathi and English borrowings. Loans from these sources have been
assimilated to different extents, as seen in the way phonological rules do or do not apply to
the different classes of words. For instance, most Sanskrit words that end in -a have been
assimilated, to become -e ending words: katha > 'kathe', rekha > 'rekhe', sabha > 'sabhe', etc.
The Perso-Arabic loans from this category undergo assimilation to an intermediate degree,
and have to be marked lexically for the assimilation rule, e.g., galla> galle; fana=fana,
nasa > nase, etc. The English borrowings with -a, however, never undergo assimilation. Thus
kyamara (camera), gorilla, etc., are always pronounced with a final a. An adequate description
of the language, therefore, has to make the rules sensitive to the source of the borrowings.
Lexical expansion due to modernization sometimes also strenghens word classes that
may not have had a large membership to begin with. This has happened with the class of
adjectives in Kannada, which is mostly populated with words from Sanskrit and English.
(Especially Sanskrit participles).
Of course, large-scale borrowings from other languages affect the phonotactics of the
language as well. Kannada now has, but previously did not have -a final and -o final words,
/f/, /z/, /z/ and /a/ and other sounds (at least in educated speech), and of course, aspiration
due to the tremendous influx of Sanskrit words (this last, of course, is not a recent development, but one that reinforces an ongoing process).
At the level of compounding, one of the most dramatic effects has been the abandonment of the restriction on hybrid compounds, the ari samasa ('compounding of foes') according
to classical Kannada grammarians. Whether or not this restriction operated in practice or it
was, as is more likely, merely a prescriptive injunction is not clear. What is clear is that
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modernization has created so many thousands of such hybrids as railu gadi "rail-cart" (for
train, the first element English and the second Perso-Arabic) that such an injunction would
be inconceivable today.
Also of importance is the proliferation of stem compounding based on the Sanskrit
model, e.g., bhadrata itakhe 'department of security' (where the first element is not an
independent word in Kannada), while the preferred structure of Kannada compound involves
two full words. Although this type of compound is used extremely widely, there seems to be
a certain amount of instability associated with such forms, as attested by variants such as
patrika helike, patrikeya helike, patrike helike all meaning 'press statement'.
On the syntactic level, the effect of modernization is harder to state with certainty,
because detailed studies of the syntax of old and middle Kannada are not available.
Nevertheless, based on impressionistic accounts, the following observations may be made.
First of all, the passive construction is undoubtedly a product of modernization. It was
for a long time considered "unnatural" in Kannada (and Dravidian languages) but there is no
doubt that it is very frequent in both the news media and formal writing. The Kannada
passive is clearly modelled on its Sanskrit and English counterparts. However, passive
without overt agents are more frequent than those with agents.
Perhaps because of the awkwardness of producing agent-ful passives in Kannada,
construction suited to agent suppression has come greatly into vogue. This is what I have
termed "the impersonal construction" in Kannada in an earlier paper (Sridhar, 1979). Here,
the underlying agent cannot appear on the surface, an object occurs sentence initially, and
the verb has an unmarked, i.e., 3rd singular neuter agreement feature. This is also extremely
frequent in newspaper reporting and in fact, this is more frequent in the language generally
than the regular passive.
Besides the agent-down playing structures, modernization has also in general increased the length and complexity of the sentences. Different types of complement structures
have been introduced, especially for reported speech. For example, gerundive complementation, where the verb of the complement (or reported) clause is turned into a gerund and the
complementizer agi is used. Incidentally, the increased use of reported speech in newspaper
writings has led to the foregrounding of the complement clause (as the new information) in
the sentence initial position, affecting the normal word order. Also, the old Kannada strategy
of expressing coordination through participles is relied on heavily, especially the present
perfect participle, which gives news its immediacy and continuity at the same time. Finally,
the internal structure of the noun phrases has become much more complex with the use of
what may be called a "nominal" style. These are only some of the more obvious syntactic
changes resulting from modernization. The topic has hardly been researched.
Modernization, especially when it involves large scale borrowing, can also lead to the
emergence of style strata and mixed bilingual or bivarietal codes. From the earlier discussion
of the sharp division between classicization and indigenization it is obvious that modernizing
communities tend to develop several styles of the new language, depending on the author's
preferences for sources of development. Thus, all modern Indian languages have a highly
Sanskritized style (preferred by those involved in standarization) which is removed from the
informal styles; they also have an Englishized style, used in academic and semi-professional
discussions; and of course, "pure" styles. The heavy concentration of borrowed elements, not
only single lexical elements but entire phrases, sentences, sequences of sentences, etc.,
distinguishes this language type (referred to as "code-mixing", see Kachru and Sridhar
(1978), Sridhar (1978), among others) from ordinary borrowing. Thus, modernization in
highly multilingual populations seems also to have the effect of creating new levels of style
differentiation and mixed bilingual codes.
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7.

CONCLUSION

I have discussed the case of Kannada at great length (although I have hardly
scratched the surface of the topic) because it seems to vividly illustrate a number of issues
involved in language modernization. On the one hand, there are those issues of language
politics and language attitudes which determine the choice of macro strategies, i.e., the choice
of language to serve as the primary source for lexical development. On the other hand, there
are the less studied but, to my mind at least, more important issues of the impact of modernization (especially exoglossic modernization) on the structure of the language, in terms of its
productive morphological processes, stratification of co-existing phonological and morphological systems, and extension of syntactic and rhetorical devices. Intimately involved in all this
is the issue of the intelligibility and comprehensibility of the product of modernization an
aspect of language communication sadly neglected by linguists. By exploring these issues
with reference to a concrete situation, I hope I have raised issues and described strategies
which have significant implications for Basque in the present crucial period of its history.

NOTES
(1) This paper is a preliminary progress report on an on-going project on language modernization in
Kannada. It is based in part on the fieldwork I conducted in Karnataka, India, as a Senior Research Fellow of the
American Institute of Indian Studies during 1988-84 and while I was on Sabbatical leave in Mysore, during
1986-87. I am grateful to the AIIS (and especially, Pradeep Mehendiratta) and to the State University of New York,
Stony Brook, for their support. I would like to record my special gratitude to E. Annamalai, Juan Cobarrubias, Braj
Kachru, Bh. Krishnamurti, and D. P. Pattanayak for their helpful comments and suggestions. Preliminary results
of this project were presented at the Symposium on Language Modernization at the University of Illinois, at a
colloquium at the Department of Linguistics, Osmania University, and as a S.S. Malawada Endowment Lecture at
Bangalore University. I am grateful to the audiences on these occasions for their contribution to the discussions. All
errors that remain are, of course, my own.
(2) This is not entirely correct, at least in Kannada. See, for example, the l l t h century prose classic,
Voddaradhane, as well as the prose of the Campu works, and the Vacanas of the 12th-13th centuries. However, there
is no doubt that poetry was the preferred mode, and that prose was not well-cultivated until the late 19th century
in most of the languages in question (see Sridhar, 1984).
(3) Thus, a large number of words that appear to be part and parcel of Kannada, such as ajja. 'grandfather',
rakta 'blood', sante 'weekly village market', and so on are borrowings from Sanskrit and Prakrit.

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