Call for papers

The East India Company and Language (1599-1857):

An Interdisciplinary One-Day Conference

British Library Conference Centre, 15 June 2010

For two hundred and fifty years, the English East India Company traded along the shores of Asia, the Middle East, and East and West Africa. The Company's presence in Asia was not only a commercial one: it operated across a vast region, and came into contact with a huge diversity of cultures and languages. Company servants had to learn to speak and write both linguae francae like Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, and Malay, and local vernaculars – or employ those who could. Those who mediated exchanges between the Company and local inhabitants; dragomans, interpreters, munshis, scribes, vakils and writers, both profoundly affected Company culture and had their own lives altered by their new roles. In time, Company settlements also had linguistic consequences for local inhabitants in general, as the Company came to impact the languages they used at work and school, eventually contributing to the development of English as a world language. The Company and the educational establishments and scholarly societies around it, from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta to the EIC College in Haileybury, produced dictionaries, grammars, manuals and translations in many languages. These works, the result of collaborations between Asian and European scholars, contributed to the emerging fields of comparative linguistics and lexicography as well as to the emergence of colonial power structures and representations.

Despite the profound influence of the East India Company on the linguistic histories of all territories it traded in – not least that of England – relatively little work has been done on the relationship between the Company and language. The aims of this conference are to explore the potential of the Company records in the India Office and beyond, to chart past and current work, and to map ways forward, including the possibilities of national and international digitization projects.

We invite papers from scholars from all disciplines who are interested in exploring the link between the East India Company and language in its broadest sense. Papers will be pre-circulated to allow the day to focus on discussion. We welcome contributions on topics such as, but in no means limited to, the following:

    • The factory or ship as a multilingual environment; Company settlements as communities of practice
    • The Company and language contact; ports and merchant quarters; pidgins; creoles
    • 'Company languages': loanwords; jargon; Hobson-Jobsonisms; Indian English(es) and 'English Indian(s)'
    • Company documents and stylistics; the Company and the history of business writing
    • The Company's servants: interpreters, agents, representatives and scribes
    • Learning and teaching languages: early European linguistic research on Asian languages; lexicography; the Company and scholarly communities; the teaching of Asian languages in England; the teaching of languages by the Company in Asia
    • Company (language) policy and the politics of language
    • The contribution of Asian linguistic thought and techniques to global scholarship on language and linguistics
    • Comparisons and contrasts: language use and policies in the Mughal Empire, the Indian Princely States, Company settlements outside Asia, Dutch Indonesia, Portuguese Goa etc.

Please contact Anna Winterbottom (a.e.winterbottom(at)qmul.ac.uk) or Samuli Kaislaniemi (samuli.kaislaniemi(at)helsinki.fi) for more details.