Atlas of the Languages and Ethnic Communities of South Asia.

• Author: SHAPIRO, MICHAEL C.
• Position: Review

Atlas of the Languages and Ethnic Communities of South Asia. By ROLAND J.-L. BRETON. Walnut Creek, Calif.: ALTAMIRA PRESS, 1997. Pp. 231. $65.

During the mid-1970s the International Center for Research on Bilingualism, located at Laval University, published two landmark works concerned with the language statistics and language geography of South Asia. The first of these was Kloss' and McConnell's Linguistic Composition of the Nations of the World, vol. 1: Central and Western South Asia (Quebec: Les Presses de 1'Universite Laval, 1975); and the second, Roland J.-L. Breton's Atlas geographique des langues et des ethnies de I'Inde et du Subcontinent: Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhoutan, Sikkim (Quebec: Les Presses de 1'Universite Laval, 1976). The two works, although dealing with similar material, complemented each other in their emphases. The Kloss and McConnell volume, given in a bilingual English and French format, was intended to serve as a compendium of statistical information from all available sources on language use in central and western South Asia. The Breton work, by contrast, dealt primarily with the cartographic aspects of lan guage dissemination in South Asia. Both works, however, were required to deal with the theoretical aspects of representing, whether in tabular or cartographic form, the dissemination of language varieties in South Asia. In Kloss and McConnell this of necessity involved much discussion of the problems inherent in the interpretation of census data. In Breton, the discussion dealt with such matters as language taxonomy, the relationship between languages and dialects, and the relationship between various languages and dialects to specific social or ethnic groups.

Over two decades have elapsed since the publication of these two works. Updating them so as to reflect current realities has been an important desideratum. The work at hand, which is essentially a revision and translation into English of the 1976 French-language first edition, is an excellent start. The first edition was divided into two main parts, the first (pp. 19-135) a theoretical discussion of the role of language within the broader ethno-cultural sphere of South Asia. The second (pp. 139-408) was structured around a set of fifty maps (each accompanied by an interpretative essay), arranged into the following nine sets: (1) the sub-continent [as a whole]; (2) the north-west; (3) the Hindi region; (4) the Himalayas and the north-east...