[lg policy] calls: The East India Company and Language

[Harold Schiffman]

The East India Company and Language


Full Title: The East India Company and Language

Date: 15-Jun-2010 - 15-Jun-2010
Location: London, United Kingdom
Contact Person: Samuli Kaislaniemi
Meeting Email: samuli.kaislaniemihelsinki.fi
Web Site: http://sites.google.com/site/eicandlanguage/

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Lexicography; Ling & Literature;
Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 28-Feb-2010

Meeting Description:

The East India Company and Language (1599-1857): An Interdisciplinary One-Day
Conference
Tuesday 15 June 2010
British Library Conference Centre

The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars from all disciplines
who are interested in the connections between the English East India
Company and
language (in its broadest sense).

Call for Papers

The deadline for the call is 28 February 2010.

Papers will be pre-circulated. There will be 15-20 minute slots for
presentations and a focus on discussion. There will also be presentations from
the India Office archivists on the forth-coming digitisation of East India
Company records and their potential for studies of language and linguistics.

For two hundred and fifty years, the English East India Company traded
along the
shores of Asia, the Middle East, and East and West Africa. The Company's
presence in Asia was not only a commercial one: it operated across a vast
region, and came into contact with a huge diversity of cultures and languages.

Company servants had to learn to speak and write both linguae francae like
Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, and Malay, and local vernaculars - or employ those
who could. Those who mediated exchanges between the Company and local
inhabitants; dragomans, interpreters, munshis, scribes, vakils and
writers, both
profoundly affected Company culture and had their own lives altered by
their new
roles. In time, Company settlements also had linguistic consequences for local
inhabitants in general, as the Company came to impact the languages
they used at
work and school, eventually contributing to the development of English as a
world language. The Company and the educational establishments and scholarly
societies around it, from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta to the EIC College in
Haileybury, produced dictionaries, grammars, manuals and translations in many
languages. These works, the result of collaborations between Asian and European
scholars, contributed to the emerging fields of comparative linguistics and
lexicography as well as to the emergence of colonial power structures and
representations.

Despite the profound influence of the East India Company on the linguistic
histories of all territories it traded in - not least that of England -
relatively little work has been done on the relationship between the
Company and
language. The aims of this conference are to explore the potential of the
Company records in the India Office and beyond, to chart past and current work,
and to map ways forward, including the possibilities of national and
international digitization projects.

We invite papers from scholars from all disciplines who are interested in
exploring the link between the East India Company and language in its broadest
sense. Papers will be pre-circulated to allow the day to focus on
discussion. We
welcome contributions on topics such as, but in no means limited to,
the following:

- The factory or ship as a multilingual environment; Company settlements as
communities of practice
- The Company and language contact; ports and merchant quarters; pidgins;
creoles
- 'Company languages': loanwords; jargon; Hobson-Jobsonisms; Indian
English(es) and 'English Indian(s)'
- Company documents and stylistics; the Company and the history of business
writing
- The Company's servants: interpreters, agents, representatives and scribes
- Learning and teaching languages: early European linguistic research on Asian
languages; lexicography; the Company and scholarly communities; the teaching of
Asian languages in England; the teaching of languages by the Company in Asia
- Company (language) policy and the politics of language
- The contribution of Asian linguistic thought and techniques to global
scholarship on language and linguistics
- Comparisons and contrasts: language use and policies in the Mughal Empire,
the Indian Princely States, Company settlements outside Asia, Dutch Indonesia,
Portuguese Goa etc.

Please contact Anna Winterbottom (a.e.winterbottomqmul.ac.uk) or Samuli
Kaislaniemi (samuli.kaislaniemihelsinki.fi) for more details, or visit the
conference website at http://sites.google.com/site/eicandlanguage.

http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-4064.html

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