Language Variation And Register Analysis In Hindi: A Case Study

Language Variation in Hindi

Discuss about the Language Variation and Register Analysis.

The essay attempts to define the signs, language variation and register analysis in the Hindi language relating to a speech by Narendra Modi at the Chandwa Rally in Jharkhand. The register can be termed as the context of the specific situation with a set of defined meanings and the configuration of semantic sources (Crum, Hartkens & Hill, 2014). Register is a combination of three variables field, tenor and mode. However, semiotics states sign as the specific word, which gets a meaning when it is used in a specific context or contrasting the system of other signs. The signifier and signified are the other components of sign forming an associate link between the two (Coward & Ellis, 2016).  The aim of the analysis is to define the language variation of the concerned language, Hindi, and by putting the register analysis the purpose or the context or the field has been defined. Here the context is a political scenario, where the renowned politician has come to address the local people to vote for their own good and the prosperity and all round development of their state. The tenor and the made can be defined as the role structure of the discourse and the purpose of the spoken language respectively.

The language Hindi has been developed through a long period, mostly in the 7^th century A.D. It has been emerged as the corrupted speech or a degenerated variety of Prakrit (Perera, 2015). The language has several dialects, as it is spoken in a wide range of area. The colloquial form of Hindi has developed its forms because of the mutual intelligibility between the spoken and the written form. However, in most of the formal situations, the formal form of Hindi is used. In the concerned instance of speech taken for the project, the politician has mixed both the formal and the colloquial forms of language. In the broader sense, Hindi is a significant part of the Indo Aryan dialect continuum, lying in the cultural Hindi belt of India. Generally the colloquial Hindi is known as the Hindusthani, which is a mixed language of Hindi and Urdu and developed under many influences due to the invasions throughout centuries. There are numbers of loan words in Hindi, from Arabic, Turkish and Persian language and some of them are from English as well because of the direct contact with British in the colonial period.

According to Lazzarato (2014), the register is the diversity in the languages, used for the specific purposes. It can also be defined as the level or the medium of formality used in the language while spoken. The situation taken here refers to a formal situation, because the politician is here addressing to the local people in the rally in a small town and asking for votes, which is being telecasted in the national media. The speech is spoken the formal form of Hindi, mostly the ‘Suddh Hindi’. However, the medium of the discourse is oral, but not spontaneous, the manner of the discourse is entirely formal, because the politician is addressing a huge crowd of local people, although he has used few colloquial forms, yet he has seemed to be very much conscious about using the formal version of the language.

Register Analysis in Hindi

Hindi language is the melting pot of many cultures and especially the formal Hindi is comprised of several words form the Sanskrit language. There are few words in the language which has shown the specific variation in the language. The form of language used here, is not generally used in a casual situation. Several Sanskrit words have been used in the speech such as,

The linguistic or the functional analysis of the taken speech shows the field, tenor and mode of the speech. The three variables of register can be analyzed here. The field is the nature of the social action taking place; field is also an aspect of the situation (Szmrecsanyi & Wälchli, 2014). Here the situation is a rally, where the politician came to promote his party and to ask for more votes for the candidate. The tenor is the role structure of the participants in the discourse and their roles and statuses. The speech has a huge crowd of indirect participants, who are cheering the politician and one direct participant is the politician. The mode of the discourse is the symbolic association or the purpose of the spoken language and what are the participants expecting from the usage of the language. It refers to the channel of the language, which is spoken here and the rhetorical mode.

It is the ideational or the logical meta-function of the text. It refers to the logical relationship of the signaled text (Lampert, 2016). Hindi is a head final language with post positional markings. The post positions are mostly the indicators of grammatical function, it might be associated with the meaning of the verb as well. Here in the speech the politician has said ‘usne loktantra ke liye apna balidan diya hai’ which means ‘He has sacrificed his life for the republic’. Here the ‘ke’ is a postpositional case marking.

Tenor refers to the participants in a specific discourse. While examining the language the context and the situation of the taken discourse, the tenor refers to the relationship between the participants (Pérez-Guerra, 2016). Here, in the speech of the politician, the politician himself is the direct participant, however the crowd acts as the indirect participants of the discourse as they are cheering their leader and sometimes speaking to him in a group. There is clear example of power play in the discourse, as the politician holds a socially upper place than the other people as he is also the prime minister of the country (Martin, 2014). However, he has a comparatively warm approach addressing the crowd as ‘bhaiyo aur baheno’, which means brothers and sisters.

This is another symbolic assistance in the language which refers to the role of the language in the discourse or its function in the context (Hatim & Mason, 2014). Here the channel is a spoken language and combination of a huge crowd and a sole politician. The spoken text generally has various forms of tense used according to the situation and more complex grammar is used. The politician has come to the small town to promote his party, so his basic purpose of the speech is to ask for more votes for the concerned candidate. It is also the aspect of the situation that discusses the component language is playing here. Here the politician has used sentences like ‘hatya ki rajniti hamara nehi hai’ which means ‘the politics of killing is not ours’. This is clear example of promoting his party whereas showing the other ones down while influencing the local people.

Field, Tenor, and Mode in the Speech

In analyzing the data, another relevant theory, structuralism, comes which refers to the three concepts sign signifier and the signified. The concept is the brainchild of famous linguist Ferdinand de Sassure, it refers to the concept that any language is intelligible except its social network and the sign, maybe a word, is meaningless when it does not have any relation with its context (Lazzarato, 2014). It only gets the meaning when it is put in a social situation or in contrast to other signs. The signifier and the signified are two components of sign. In the given data, there are numbers of examples that show the justification to this theory. For instance, ‘ye desh aapka hai’, which means ‘This country is yours’, here the words ‘aapka hai’ (yours) is the signifier and the signified concept is that the country is yours (while addressing the crowd). The sign is the relationship between the signifier and the signified concept.

Even if the speech is constructed in a formal language, the language of social networking of Narendra Modi is not that formal. However, mostly English language has been used in that case, not Hindi. Yet there are few slogans that are used by him ‘Swach Bharat’ meaning ‘Clean India’ or ‘Sab ka Saath, Sab ka Vikas’ meaning ‘With everyone, development of everyone’ had been put in formal Hindi dialect. However, following the trend in social media, the language is quite informal, sometimes addressing the people as ‘friends’. The profiles in twitter and facebook have millions of shares and a notable informality can be seen there.

Conclusion

Among the three concepts of language, culture and communication, the communication is seen to be predominant in the recorded data. The discourse is a cluster of conventionalized and expected. It is a goal oriented communicative action that has risen from imperatives in the continuously evolving socio cultural situation. The genre of political communication is a compound and heterogeneous discourse, which traces the activated situational context. The context of the communication has been considered to be relatively stable and had predictable language forms, even in the social media sites. However, the informal forms may be realized by several forms that can diverge from the distinctive features as well.

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