Language Log

Fundamental definition and basic discussion for comprehending the rest of this post

Dalit

From Hindi दलित (dalit, “downtrodden, oppressed”), from Sanskrit दलित (dalita, “broken, scattered”).

Learned borrowing from Sanskrit दलित (dalita, “broken, destroyed, split”), originally an adjectival form of दलन (dalana, “splitting, destruction”), from the root दल् (dal, “to split, crack”).

Proper noun

दलित • (dalit) m (Urdu spelling دلت)

Dalit (a caste excluded from Vedic society)

Noun

Dalit (member of the Dalit caste)

Synonym: (now derogatory) हरिजन (harijan), a term coined by Indian social reformer Gandhi in 1932; a Sanskritic formation from हरि (hari, “God”) +‎ जन (jan, “people”), literally “children of God”.

A member of a South Asian group of people traditionally regarded as untouchables or outcastes.

Jogendra Nath Mandal was the first leader to have ever fought for a further identity of the Dalits, holding that they are nor Hindus nor Muslims.

Dalit (English: /ˈdælɪt/ from Sanskrit: दलित meaning "broken/scattered") is a term used for untouchables and outcasts, who represented the lowest stratum of the castes in the Indian subcontinent. They are also called Harijans. Dalits were excluded from the fourfold varna of the caste hierarchy and were seen as forming a fifth varna, also known by the name of Panchama. Several scholars have drawn parallels between Dalits and the Burakumin of Japan, the Baekjeong of Korea and the peasant class of the medieval European feudal system. Dalits predominantly follow Hinduism with significant populations following Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, and Islam. The constitution of India includes Dalits as one of the Scheduled Castes; this gives Dalits the right to protection, positive discrimination (known as reservation in India), and official development resources.

(sources:  here, here, here)

Suffice it to say that "dalit" is an intensely charged term in Indian politics.  Some aspects of the rhetoric surrounding it may be grasped by evoking the concept of "equal opportunity" in American sociopolitics.

I'm not 100% certain what precipitated the epiphany of the Goddess of English on that first occasion when she appeared in the world.  Apparently she was the brainchild of Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit writer who came up with the idea of Angrezi Devi for the purpose of leveraging the world language to enhance the Dalits' social standing.

Anyway, I regret that I missed her back in 2010, when she appeared in the rural village of Banka, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, between Lucknow and New Delhi, but more to the Delhi side.  Banka is inhabited by Dalits (formerly referred to as Untouchables or Outcasts), also called Harijans.

Angrezi Devi did not have much of an impact that first time around, largely because of government interference with the building of the temple that was to be dedicated to her.

Fortunately, the Goddess of English reappeared in 2014, and Mark Liberman wrote a Language Log post about her, "The once and future goddess" (8/28/14).  Again though, I wasn't quite sure what prompted her to come forth on that occasion (see below).

The village is famous for its temple to the Goddess of English:

The English temple was built near the Nalanda Public Shiksha Niketan School from April 2010 onwards in black granite and inaugurated on 25 October in honour of the anniversary of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay's birthday. It contains a Statue of Liberty-inspired statue of the goddess wearing hat and gown, clutching a pen and a guide to the Indian Constitution. A computer screen by its side features the Buddhist Dharma chakra. The walls are adorned with numerous symbols related to the maths and sciences. The purpose of the temple is to promote the English language among the Dalit peoples, which local governors believe crucial to the future success of the area and improving education.

(source)

This time, the religion of Angrezi Devi once more failed to flourish.  But here it is, ten years after the goddess's second coming, and she is featured in a major New Yorker article:

How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?
English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result.
By Manvir Singh, New Yorker (December 23, 2024)

The article is long and rambling.  It touches on many topics, which I will summarize in the following paragraphs, but it begins and concludes with Angrezi Devi as the central theme.

Why?

What prompted Manvir Singh, a cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, to resurrect the Goddess of English at this particular time?

The answer, which I shall reveal near the middle of this post, is quite surprising.  Meanwhile, here's how the New Yorker article begins:

In 2010, a new goddess, about two feet tall and cast in bronze, was set to appear in a village within the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. She looked nothing like the deities of Hindu mythology. In lieu of Durga’s bright saris or Lakshmi’s opulent jewels, she wore a wide-brimmed hat and the robes of the Statue of Liberty. She wasn’t riding a lion or a swan; she stood on a desktop computer. Instead of a sword or a spear, she held a pen in one hand and the Indian constitution—with its promise of legalized equality—in the other. Her name was Angrezi Devi, the Goddess English, and she was intended for India’s Dalits, or “untouchables.”

“The Goddess English can empower Dalits, giving them a chance to break free from centuries of oppression,” her creator, the prominent Dalit writer Chandra Bhan Prasad, declared. He saw English as an immensely valuable resource for the Dalit. “Will English-speaking Dalits be expected to clean gutters and roads?” he asked. “Will English-speaking Dalits be content to work as menials at landlords’ farms?” An atheist, he designed the goddess in order to infuse English into the Dalit identity, propelling his people from a feudal subaltern standing to the ranks of the modern and independent. “Learning English has become the greatest mass movement the world has ever seen,” he wrote.

Now I switch to bullet points to make the desultory topics of the article more manageable (they are by VHM, not AI!):

• The ubiquity of English as the “lingua franca of the world".
• Angst and opposition caused by the expansion of English.
• The erosion of cultural identities and the prospect of cognitive hegemony.  "Languages… influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture—can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality."
• The "egalitarianism that’s inherent in English and missing from its Indian alternatives".
• The qualms of the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the French sociologist Bourdieu about the anglicization of culture.
• Views attributed to Benjamin Lee Whorf about how language influences thought, e.g., temporal flow in English and Hopi.  Despite Whorf's nuanced expression of his own ideas about the relationship between language and thought, he has become the target of opponents of linguistic determinism. 
• Brother John's periodic aphasia.  Stephen Pinker's opposition to Whorfianism in The Language Instinct (1994).
• Latest research shows that Whorfianism isn’t all wrong.  For instance, Julie Sedivy's account in Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love (2024) growing up in a “linguistic bedlam,” where she contends that, as Singh puts it, "distinct cognitive styles are tied to the different languages she speaks".
• "Weak Whorfianism", where the testimony of polyglots shows that their disparate languages nudge their speakers in diverse directions.
• Neo-Whorfian research such as Jonathan Winawer's 2007 study that demonstrated how Russian speakers are faster at distinguishing shades of blue corresponding to their two basic color terms: goluboy (lighter blue) and siniy (darker blue).

The next paragraph struck me like a bolt of lightning, so I will cease my bullet point presentation and speak in my own voice for a moment, then switch to a lengthy quotation, before returning to Angrezi Devi.  The next section is the raison d'être for this article.  At its core, Singh's article is a review of Caleb Everett's A Myriad of Tongues (2023).  The rest of the article is there to buttress the review.

This section struck me so powerfully because Caleb Everett is the son of missionary turned linguist Daniel Everett, my favorite living linguist, about whom I had just written this post, "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/16/25), and was feeling a little bit bad because of some misguided notions, such as that language is comparable to walking, that it elicited.  Dan's magnum opus, which I introduced in my post, is How Language Began:  The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention (2017), and it is anything but simplistic.

To resume the thrust of this post, which is ostensibly about Angrezi Devi, but was prompted by Caleb Everett's book, who Singh tells us, "spent much of his childhood in Brazil. His parents intermittently took him to the Amazon to stay with the Pirahã, a people legendary for speaking a language devoid of words for numbers and colors, which contributed to his lifelong fascination with linguistic and cognitive diversity."  In my post yesterday, I gave Language Log readers a chance to hear his father speaking that unique Pirahã language.

Everett’s book is about the surprising ways that languages differ and about the significance these differences may have. He starts by covering Whorf’s favorite topic: time. English speakers instinctively split time into categories of past, present, and future, but many others don’t. Karitiâna, an Amazonian language Everett studied two decades ago, has two tenses, future and non-future, while another Amazonian language, Yagua, seems to have eight, including for events that occurred between a month and a year ago, for events that are about to happen, and for events expected to happen further into the future.

More relevant for Whorfianism are the metaphors people use to organize time. For English speakers, time is understood spatially, with the past typically “behind us” and the future “ahead.” Aymara, an Andean language spoken by millions of Indigenous Bolivians and Peruvians, likewise uses space to talk about time but favors a metaphor about sight. In Aymara, nayra, or last year, translates literally to something like “the year I can see.” The past, visible, thus stands in front of the speaker, while the future, unseeable, looms behind. Ancha nayra pachana, or a long time ago, can roughly be translated as “a time way in front of me.” When researchers analyzed videos of people chatting, they noticed that the metaphors inform gesture, with fluent Aymara speakers pointing backward to talk about the future and forward to talk about the past. Spanish speakers from the same region show the opposite patterns, suggesting that language configures how speakers map time onto space.

Aymara speakers are far from unique here. Speakers of Lisu, a Tibeto-Burman language, also talk about the future as lying behind them and the past as in front of them. Everett tells us that Yupno, a language spoken in the eastern New Guinea highlands, invokes a three-dimensional analogy. Like a gravity-defying river, the future is said to flow up mountains, while the past flows downhill. As with Aymara speakers, the metaphor manifests in gesture: how Yupno speakers point depends on the orientation of the nearest mountain range. Some cognitive scientists have assumed that all humans, whatever their local quirks, reason about time using spatial metaphors, yet at least one language, Tupi-Kawahíb, evidently lacks any mapping between time and space—not left to right, back to front, or downhill to uphill. When Tupi-Kawahíb speakers were asked to organize objects to chart out the seasons of a year, researchers struggled to understand the arrangements the speakers had created. More than communication tools, languages help concretize the abstract, providing frameworks for making sense of concepts as fundamental as time.

Of the many topics Everett covers—which include space, number, and object categorization—the most fascinating is probably sensory vocabulary. Western writers have long assumed that human beings have an inherently limited capacity to describe some senses, with olfaction ranking as the most elusive. We can speak abstractly about colors (red, blue, black) and sound (high, low, loud). With smell, though, we usually give “source-based” references (“like cut grass”). But the cognitive scientist Asifa Majid, now of Oxford, and the linguist Niclas Burenhult, of Lund University, in Sweden, have shown that this needn’t be the case. They discovered that the Jahai, hunter-gatherers living at the border of Malaysia and Thailand, have a rich vocabulary of abstract smell words. One Jahai term, itpit, refers to the “intense smell of durian, perfume, soap, Aquillaria wood, and bearcat,” Majid and Burenhult report. Another, cnes, applies to “the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, leaf of gingerwort, wood of mango tree.” Subsequent research has found large olfactory lexicons in at least forty other languages, among them Fang, Khmer, Swahili, and Zapotec.

It makes a difference. In a study that Majid and Burenhult conducted a decade ago, Jahai and English speakers were asked to identify and name twelve smells, including cinnamon, turpentine, gasoline, and onion. English speakers, despite their greater familiarity with the odors, faltered. They mostly gave rambling source-based answers and showed almost no agreement among themselves. One English speaker presented with cinnamon responded, “I don’t know how to say that, sweet, yeah; I have tasted that gum like Big Red or something tastes like, what do I want to say? I can’t get the word. Jesus it’s that gum smell like something like Big Red. Can I say that? Ok. Big Red. Big Red gum.” But Jahai speakers named smells with relative ease. They used abstract terms and were much more likely to converge in their responses. In a follow-up study, wine and coffee experts performed just as badly as novices when given non-wine and non-coffee smells, suggesting the Jahai’s enhanced abilities aren’t simply a result of practice in attending to aromas. Rather, the regular exercise of sorting the olfactory world with abstract labels seems to change how the Jahai understand all smells, familiar and otherwise.

The work on olfaction is a tiny part of a large research program, much of it headed by Majid, that has overturned the scientific consensus on how humans talk about the senses. At least since Aristotle, many writers have posited a sensorial hierarchy: seeing and hearing are said to be the most salient to our minds and the easiest to verbalize, followed by taste, touch, and finally smell. Contesting that thesis, Majid and her colleagues have developed a measure called codability, which captures how easily a sense is expressed. Codability is high when members of a language community converge on one or two abstract labels to describe a stimulus; ask English speakers to tell you the color of a stop sign, and you’d expect high codability. It’s low, in contrast, when people provide diverse, protracted, and ad-hoc descriptions—as when, say, you ask English speakers to describe the smell of a rutabaga.

Majid and her team measured codability for the five senses in twenty far-flung languages, including three unrelated sign languages. English, the only spoken Western European tongue in the sample, was also the only one to exhibit high codability for sight and hearing and low codability for everything else. “Rampant variation” reigned, the researchers found. English speakers floundered when talking about touch (in response to sandpaper, felt, rubber, etc.), but speakers of certain other languages—such as Dogul Dom, in Mali, and Siwu, in Ghana—tended to agree in their descriptions. In many languages, including Lao, Farsi, Yucatec, and Cantonese, taste turned out to be the most expressible sense.

As researchers look beyond English, close relatives (like Spanish and German), and other so-called behemoth languages (like Mandarin and Arabic), they encounter differences long thought impossible. Twenty years ago, abstract smell vocabularies seemed ridiculous. Burenhult studied the Jahai language for a decade, even writing a doctoral dissertation on its grammar, before Majid asked him to run a battery of tasks that revealed Jahai speakers’ exceptional way of talking about smell. Other linguistic features once assumed to be universal—such as tenses, personal pronouns, and even, potentially, a distinction between nouns and verbs—have turned up missing when greater numbers of languages have been scrutinized. Likewise, we’ve enlarged our sense of the metaphors used to map concepts. English describes acoustic pitch using a verticality metaphor (high-low), but a study by experts in musical cognition found that people around the world use at least thirty-five other mappings, such as small-big, alert-sleepy, pretty-ugly, tense-relaxed, summer-winter, and—in the case of some traditional Zimbabwean instrumentalists—“crocodile” (low pitch) and “those who follow crocodiles” (high pitch).

Everett’s book revels in such discoveries, which multiply the conceivable differences separating languages. In a recent review of the research literature, the language scientist Damián E. Blasi, along with Majid and others, listed the many cognitive domains that English seems to affect, including memory, theory of mind, spatial reasoning, event processing, aesthetic preferences, and sensitivity to rhythm and melody. Languages help shape the worlds we inhabit less through a few grammatical rules than through countless subtle distinctions. John McWhorter might have been right that the effect of any single linguistic feature is minor. But, as Isaac Newton realized when developing calculus, innumerable tiny effects create large-scale patterns.

After that long paean to Caleb Everett's impressive tome, Manvir Singh comes back to the saga of Angrezi Devi and explains what happened to her:

Prasad’s Goddess English was meant to début on October 25, 2010. She was supposed to inhabit a temple of black granite, its walls engraved with scientific formulas and the names of great English writers. But the big day never came. The district government blocked the temple’s construction. Prasad recalls a local official hinting that the decision came from Kumari Mayawati, then the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Mayawati, who is herself Dalit and who had statues made in her honor while in office, enjoys an almost mythical status in the Dalit community. An Indian journalist reported rumors that Mayawati had blocked the temple because she wanted only “one Dalit goddess in the state.” After she left office, in 2012, Prasad hoped construction on the temple might resume. It didn’t. Five years later, Uttar Pradesh elected Yogi Adityanath, a monk and a Hindu nationalist from the Bharatiya Janata Party, as its new chief minister, and the prospect of a shrine to English may have dimmed further.

Back to the bullet points to close the article briefly:

• It is the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., that has ruled India since Narendra Modi took power, in 2014 (note that date!).  For Modi and the B.J.P., English is a symbol of India's imperialist past.
• Prasad vs. Bourdieu — English as a blessing or a curse.
• Cultural psycholinguistics without emphasizing English so exclusively
• Indian English is its own thing.  It is not beholden to British hegemony.
• Similar developments in Singapore and elsewhere around the world.  "For that matter, few tongues exemplify the ever-evolving nature of language better than so-called Standard English, which, after millennia of conquest, conversion, and commerce, has acquired a vocabulary that is roughly seventy per cent non-Germanic and a simplified grammar that facilitates its spread among adults."

As a scholar of medieval Buddhist vernacular literature, the first written vernacular of China, it is not the least unexpected to me that the Dalits would feel an affinity with Angrejee bhaasha  अंग्रेजी भाषा ("English Language").

 

Selected readings

• "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/16/25)
• "Bahasa and the concept of 'National Language'" (3/14/13)
• "Acquiring literacy in medieval Dunhuang" (2/20/21)
• "A medieval Dunhuang man" (7/17/23)

[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]