The question of national language choice, acceptance, promo tion, and development has raised a great deal of conflict in India. The conflict is related to the status and function of the national language, Hindi,1 and the ex-colonial language, English, on the one hand, and Hindi and other Indian languages on the other. This paper examines the complexity and dynamics of the conflict and provides an explanation within the framework of the political sociology of language for it. The main objective is to highlight some recurrent features characteristic of language conflict in most developing nations and to arrive at generalizations which would be relevant for both language planning theory as well as for the political sociology of language.
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