ABSTRACT
Hans Harder's introductory chapter, “The Vernacular as a Concept,” examines the term ‘vernacular’ by retracing its astounding trajectory and evaluating its various uses in contemporary parlance and debates. After looking into the term's etymology, Harder demonstrates that in South Asia, the decisive shift in meaning happened in the nineteenth century, when it came to be employed to juxtapose regional languages not to classical ones, but to English. He distinguishes two different but often conflated uses of the term, the spoken vernacular1 and the literary vernacular2 and shows that the vernacular is always conceived as a relational category.
