India as a Linguistic Area

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Professor Murray Emeneau was the first to suggest that India was a Sprachbund. In his classic paper, 'India as a Linguistic Area', published in 1956 he explored the data and specified the tools to establish that language and culture had fused for centuries on the Indian soil to produce an integrated mosaic of structural convergence of four distinct language families viz., Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda and Tibeto-Burman. This concept provided scholarly substance for explaining the underlying Indian-ness of apparently divergent cultural and linguistic patterns. With his further contributions (published as a book in 1980 by Stanford University under the title Language and Linguistic Area: Essays by Murray B. Emeneau), this area has now become a major field of research in language contact and convergence. Consequently, South Asia is now recognized not only as a 'linguistic area', but also as a 'sociolinguistic area', 'a cultural area', and also as 'a translation area.'