Concept paper for the
International Seminar on
Linguistic and Cultural Issues of Developing Nations
A seminar to
commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of
Professor Suniti Kumar
Chatterji
India, along with many other developing nations in today’s
world, face many common linguistic and socio cultural issues. Such nations are
almost always diverse with different kinds of social groups. They differ in
terms of religion, castes, and creeds, cultures and customs, languages and
beliefs, etc. This diversity may harbour different challenges of the nations.
There may be problems of unity because of this cultural diversity. It may
harbour discordant social patterns. Also there are arguments that the extreme
diversity and traditional cultural practices
may hinder economic growth. Besides most of the new developing nations
have been former colonies of developed countries. This brings in issues of the
influence of a dominant culture and language. The pattern of resource
distribution among linguistic and cultural groups, the role and choice of
language in education etc. The choices made by the policy makers on such issues
have great impact on language maintenance and death, language conflicts, attitude
of the individuals and the communities towards different languages.
We are celebrating the 125th birth anniversary of the doyen
of Indian Linguistics, Professor Suniti Kumar Chatterji this year. His magnum
opus the Origin and Development of
Bengali Language is a chef d’oeuvre of modern linguistics. His interests
went beyond linguistics and was wide and all encompassing. He has written extensively on diverse
cultural, educational and social issues. He was a member of the upper house of
the legislative body of West Bengal and has spoken and written considerably on
various issues related to language politics and language policy. For this, we
believe that a true tribute to this great scholar would be organise a
discussion on language and cultural issues of developing countries.
objective of the
seminar
In this seminar, we
aim to bring together scholars from diverse discipline working on language,
politics and history of different developing nations to bring in their output
on related issues. We hope to bring in celebrated scholars from the Asian
subcontinent with published research on the theme of the seminar. Through the
lectures and discussions on the given issue, we may get a clear understanding
of the root of the problems in this area and the best possible way of handling
them.
target participants
we plan to invite
established scholars working on sociolinguistic issue from Pakistan, Bangladesh
and India as speakers for in depth discussion of issues in general and pertaining to these countries in particular. In the audience, we plan to bring together
scholars of language and cultural issues from Kolkata and around.
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