Script and identity – the politics of writing in South Asia: an introduction

Abstract

This essay gives an overview of the complex relationships between language, script, and identity in various speech communities across South Asia. South Asia hosts a great number of languages, whose written forms play an important role in the formation of their speakers’ identity. Apart from polygraphia, i.e. several scripts for one language, and the phenomenon of one script being shared by several languages, some scripts have been assigned or associated with a dominant or dominating role over the course of time. The reasons for choosing one script over another can be linked to the conscious and unconscious strengthening of ethnic, national, and/or religious identities. These choices can also be linked to state agencies, their regulation of mass education and bureaucracy, or simply to standardization processes caused by technological inventions. In this issue, which contains six articles, the authors compare socioculturally and linguistically divergent geographic areas to examine script-related politics of identity among Chakma, Konkani, Marathi, Meitei, Punjabi, Santali, and Tamil speakers. In the essay at hand, meanwhile, we highlight the complex roles various scripts have played across geopolitical, linguistic, and religious borders, for instance the Arabic, so-called Bengali, Nagari, or Roman scripts.