Language families, Whorf, code-switching, India

Language is a social fact: history, structure, and inequality of whose tongue gets a school.

• Historical: William Jones — Sanskrit, Greek, Latin kinship of tongues.
• Saussure: langue vs parole; meaning from contrast.
• Sapir–Whorf: language inclines thought (Boroditsky-type gender and space studies) — weak version for Mains.
• Code-switching is rule-governed, not sloppiness. Lakoff and Tannen on gendered talk.
• Pidgin → creole; nationalism polices purity.

• Census language counts swing with definitions (1961 vs 2011 teaching shock).
• Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic (Munda; Mon-Khmer Khasi/Nicobarese), Tibeto-Burman — map, don’t memorise every name.
• Mother-tongue schools, speaker death, Andamanese loss — language death is archive death.
• Divine/Babel vs bow-wow / ding-dong origin stories: history of ideas, not current science.

• Paralanguage: how it is said — tone, pitch, volume, speed — carries feeling the lexicon does not.
• Kinesics: gesture, posture, gaze. Proxemics: how close is polite. High-touch vs low-touch cultures; handshake vs hug as coded distance.
• Lakoff and Tannen: gendered talk is training, not a smaller brain. Code-switching remains rule-governed in the same conversation.