ABSTRACT
A striking feature of the Survey is its grappling with the multiple names for India’s languages and dialects. Its first task was to cross-identify the different names it received for each language and dialect in India. However, it does not reify these names; instead it goes out of its way to call attention to their variants. It foregrounds the difficulties of fixing Indian languages through naming. In doing so, the Survey calls attention to local Indian nomenclature for dialects and languages, thereby relativising English designations for Indian languages, as well as the Survey’s own naming practices, in relation to an Indian linguistic ecology. Thus, as with the Survey’s mapping of languages, its reluctance to reify the names of Indian languages is also at odds with the regionalising of languages as discrete entities in the Survey.
