The Linguistic Survey of India’s Experiment in Mapping Languages, 1896–1927
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11939653 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philip Jagessar (0000-0002-4925-7056, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 75 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 72-89 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-02 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Imago Mundi (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-5694 • E-ISSN: 1479-7801 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03085694.2023.2225984 |
| OpenAlex | W4386139050 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), supervised by the Anglo-Irish linguist and civil servant George A. Grierson, surveyed and classified more than seven hundred languages and dialects. An integral part of the state-funded survey was mapping where languages were spoken in India, which resulted in the publication of 45 language maps between 1899 and 1927. As individual maps they are comparable to other thematic maps of the period. As a series of language maps, however, they are inconsistent in scale, colour, use of relief and labels, and depiction of boundaries. This paper argues that the inconsistency in presentation reflected the LSI’s experimental approach to mapping language, trying to reconcile the approximate representation of a complex geographical phenomenon with the colonial state’s expectation for accurate and up-to-date language maps
Art · Cartography · Depiction · Geography · Irish · Linguistics · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Presentation (obstetrics · Representation (politics · Scale (ratio · State (computer science · Thematic map · Toponymy · Computer Science · History · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philippine History and Culture
| Citations per year | 1.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2025 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |