Cultural Keywords in Indian English
Pam Peters · Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021
Pam Peters’s paper on Indian English keywords presents a diachronic approach to identifying cultural keywords, in a combination of historical lexicography and 21st century data from the GloWbE corpus. She focuses on Arabic and Persian words with long histories of use from the Mughal regime (approximately 1600–1800), which managed both India and Pakistan through a Hindi-Urdu contact language (Hindustani), and continued to be used under the British Raj until the partition of India in 1947. A sample of the long-lived Persian and Arabic words show ongoing language–culture connections in references to monetary and legal institutions, as well as traditional foods, costume and entertainment. But other colonial words designating once important roles in handling money and managing large households are now degraded or neutralised in proper names. Traditional terms of reference and address from Arabic are still widely used in online Indian English, to affirm shared social and cultural relationships; and though their connotations of respect or friendship are eroded, they continue to index such values in changing social contexts.