Mother Tongue Prestige: The Sociolinguistics of Privilege in Urban Middle-Class Education in India

This book studies the intersection of language and social privilege in education in India. The author examines how and why education at the pre-primary, secondary, and higher education levels in India remains largely segregated by socioeconomic class and caste through the lens of language.

Jessica Sujata Chandras is a linguistic anthropologist trained in qualitative, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic research methods. Currently, she holds an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at the University of North Florida. Her PhD is in Anthropology from the George Washington University, in Washington, DC, and was awarded in 2019. Her ongoing research in India examines values attached to language and practices of multilingual language socialization pertaining to education through a lens of power. She explores a political economy of language with a focus on intersections of language and socioeconomic class, caste, and politics of language revitalization movements. In her projects, she examines configurations of identity categories, such as caste and class, with language negotiations in access to education. Previously, she has also worked and researched in multilingual communities on impacts of indigenous language on identity and community formation in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the Basque Country.