India: Language Situation
E Annamalai is professor emeritus of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India. After retirement from the directorship of this institute, he has been a visiting professor at the Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo; International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden; Department of Linguistics, University of Melbourne; and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He is currently a visiting professor at Yale University. He is a member of India's National Council for the Promotion of Indian Languages. His earlier training in Tamil and Linguistics was at Annamalai University, India. He studied generative grammar and semantics at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. and was a visiting faculty in the Department of South Asian Civilization and Languages. Professor Annamalai's research interests include the study of language policy and its implementation in its linguistic, social, and political dimensions, language contact and its linguistic consequences as well as lexicographic and grammatical description for a comparative understanding of the lexical and syntactic structures of languages. Some of his recent sociolinguistic papers are ‘Language choice in education: conflict resolution in indian courts,’ Language Science 2(1), 1999; Use of language rights by minorities in right to language, equity, power and education (Robert Phillipson, ed., 2000); Medium of power: the question of English in education in medium of instruction policies: which agenda? whose agenda? (James Tollefson and Amy Tsui, eds., 2003); ‘Language policy for multilingualism: a reflective essay,’ Language Policy 2(2). His books include Lectures on modern Tamil (1999), Managing multilingualism: political and linguistic manifestations (2001), and (with Ron Asher) Colloquial Tamil (2002). He continues to publish papers and books on syntactic and semantic analysis and on lexicographic problems, particularly with reference to Tamil, in addition to his publications in the area of social and historical relation between the languages of India.