Scenario of language replacement

Arun Gupta suvidya at WORLDNET.ATT.NET
Wed Nov 8 15:38:40 UTC 2000


In Frontline, Professor Asko Parpola gives mentions two historical cases of
how the language of a minority displaced a majority.  Supposedly these
parallel what happened in ancient India with the incursion of the
Indo-Aryans.

The two examples given are the British in India, and the displacement of the
native languages in South America.  Neither case parallels what may have
happened in ancient India because the technological gap between ingressor
and resident was much more significant in these two examples; the ingressor
remained vitally connected to a flourishing and
technologically-rapidly-advancing external culture in these two examples,
and in the case of South America, the native population was decimated by
diseases new to them that came from Europe.

-Arun Gupta





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