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When a society faces a moment of crisis, its language can mirror, expose, and reinforce societal chaos and fault lines. As India came to terms with COVID-19, the coronavirus’ impacts on different populations exposed and widened India's deep social, economic, and religious divides. This article studies the language of India's response to COVID-19 surrounding three major events that occurred in the early months of the pandemic: the janta curfew, the Tablighi Jamaat incident, and the migrant worker crisis. Through an analysis of media reports, speeches made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and representations on social media, we see how forms of linguistic trickery—silence, presuppositions, accommodations, othering, dog whistling, and povertyism—were used to suppress, harm, and marginalize two minority groups: Muslims and migrant workers. This article demonstrates how those in power use language to reflect, shape, and reinforce meaning, social hierarchies, and marginalization in a time of crisis. (Linguistic trickery, othering, silence, presupposition, accommodation, dog whistling, povertyism)

I study a community of men who self-identify as janana and have sex with men on the streets of Lucknow, India. Jananas (also called kotis, Hall 2005) occupy liminal spaces in the gender and sexuality continua in Lucknow and India. My research focuses on what informs identity and how identity is formed in interaction. I use ethnography and the communities of practice framework (Eckert and McConnell Ginet 1992) to study the janana community of practice. My goal in this paper is to explore how as researchers and sociolinguists we find nuances in the gender and sexuality continua and language use in cultures that we do not know well, or in cultures to which we belong, to comment on how language use becomes meaningful in communities. My work with jananas shows that gender and sexuality are reliant on class associations and vary with respect to how much a janana feels obligated to their family. This chapter answer questions about identifying cultures in communities, finding identity in interaction, and how to make local meaning speak to global ideas about culture, gender, and language use.

This study is a critical examination of news reports, editorials, and other stories directly related to the rape of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi, India, on 16 December 2012. I examine newspaper stories published in two widely circulated newspapers, The Times of India and Dainik Jagran from 17 December to 31 December, two days after the victim died of the injuries incurred during the rape on 16 December. Studies have shown that English or regional language newspapers in India do not give fair treatment in terms of coverage of incidents related to violence against women. This story, however, was different. I provide a critical discourse analysis of news reports, editorials, and comments on this episode to show that the social construction of violence against women, ideological prisms of the reporters, socio-cultural contexts of the media reports, and neoliberal subjectivity that was shaken by this episode played into the newspapers’ treatment of this news.

In this paper, we juxtapose the present-day Supreme Court battles over the colonial anti-sodomy provisions in the Indian Penal Code (Section 377), with everyday interpretations of carnal intercourse by kotis and jananas in order to visibilize a whole different social world of carnality. The responses to the law coming from the civil society formations (namely the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights organizations, HIV/AIDS organizations and women's rights organizations) are the site for the formation of a modern Indian homosexual subject, one who claims her/his rights to love and privacy through the language of human rights and constitutional freedom. We argue that the arrival of the modern rights-bearing homosexual subject is contested by political and religious formations through discourses of sin, unnaturality and proper sexual conduct. The contestation of religious discourse through the discourse of constitutional rights covers over the creative interpretations of religion provided by ...

Consonants in written Hindi often carry annotations indicating the nature of the following vowel, which is not written separately. When there is no explicit marking, schwa is the default vowel, but this vowel does not always emerge in a word’s pronunciation. In addition, morphological boundaries can block the deletion of inherent schwas. Previous implementations of schwa deletion in the domain of text-to-speech synthesis (Narasimhan et al., International Journal of Speech Technology, 7(4):319–333, 2004; Choudhury and Basu, Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge-Based Computer Systems, 343–353, 2002) delete schwa in phonetic environments that obey the phonotactic constraints of Hindi within word boundaries. Instead of using segmental contexts, in conjunction with a morphological analysis, to predict schwa deletion, we used an account of syllable structure and stress assignment for two- and three-syllable words (Beckman and Pierrehumbert, forthcoming) to predict the presence and absence of schwa in a corpus of phonetically transcribed Hindi. Our algorithm scored as high as 95% accuracy on the deletion of schwa from a small corpus of Hindi words.