English in South Asia: Lessons and parallels

Braj B. Kachru's work on South Asian English, part of his larger research framework of ‘World Englishes’, is recognized as a significant contribution to linguistics, especially contact linguistics. In 1979, he also dealt with the ‘Englishization of Hindi’, an issue more fully pursued by Yamuna Kachru. A first discussion of the significance of the two-way interaction between English and South Asian languages for contact linguistics was presented in Hock (2015). This paper further explores these implications – for Language Contact in general, for the prehistoric ‘Indianization’ of Sanskrit, and for Sanskrit as pan-Indian link language under the Guptas.