JNU Langscape

In 2011, students of the Centre for Linguistics came together to conduct a sociolinguistic survey of the University community. Funded by the Central institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, this unique community exercise was intended primarily to get the campus community to reflect on their languages, the patterns of their use in daily interaction and education, and to highlight the fact that rather than one or two dominant languages, the defining feature of our social milieu is multilingualism. The other aim was to understand the linguistic composition of the JNU  community, to obtain information about the languages spoken in the community.

In 2017, a fresh generation of students conducted Langscape 2017, but since this research was unfunded, the scale was significantly smaller than the previous one. The objectives of the survey were largely the same, although the content of the survey instrument varied a little, to bring into reckoning the use of language on social media and messenger apps.

In this section of the website, we share brief reports of these two surveys. Unfortunately, the data from the two surveys has not been as comprehensively analysed as it should be, but even the broad results showcase an admirable degree of language diversity, language maintenance, general awareness of the politics of language, and multilingualism.