SOCIOLOGY OF SECRET LANGUAGES

Sociology of Secret Languages is a challenging work on a subject which is at one original and exciting. It seeks to provide, in a multi-dimensional and multi-level frame, and authentic account of the special and secret languages of some small, cohesive, and closed groups in relation to their socio-cultural matrix. The four studies included in this monograph delineate how the language disguise helps the speakers not only to carry on their profession, legitimate or illegitimate, but also to maintain and reinforce their group exclusiveness and we-feeling. In the words of Professor Samarin of the University of Toronto, this book is "a valuable contribution to Indian studies as well as to the study of argots".

About the Author:

Dr. R. R. Mehrotra (b. 1936) has been on the faculty of Banaras Hindu University from 1959. He obtained M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from Banaras Hindu University and diploma in Teaching English from the Central Institute of English, Hyderabad. As a British Council scholar he spent one academic year at the University of Leeds where he studied general linguistics with specialisation in anthropological linguistics. He is Member of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom and Fellow of the Institute of Linguists, London. He was a Visiting Fellow (1971-74) at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, where he completed the present monograph in addition to Language and Social Interaction (forthcoming).

Dr Mehrotra has published several papers in learned journals on sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and literary criticism. In socio-linguistics he has been particularly interested in social dialects, speech events, and problems of bilingualism.

Secret and Secondary Number-Names :
  A Functional Perspective

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