Language making in the borders

Abstract

    The paper aims to discuss the case of a border of three provinces in India, where similar contact-based hybrid languages have three provincially selected official regional standard languages. The paper focuses on the province of West Bengal, which observed the initiation of colonial language policies in India, but it continued to practice the colonial traditions for a long time. The paper: (a) discusses the nature of hybrid languages in Bengal-Jharkhand-Odisha border zone of India (b) discusses how certain languages are ‘made’ in the extensive hybrid linguistic zones and (c ) reflects on the everyday language use of the target areas while analysing the syntactic structure of some hybrid forms.