Getting approval and finding an advisor

One of the biggest challenges for academics doing field research is not gathering the data, but remaining ethical while doing so. Almost every field that interacts with other living things has courses and books dedicated to ethics. Maybe 50 years ago this was not a huge issue, but today it is, and rightfully so. Things like consent and privacy have to be foremost in the minds of a researcher. It is often unknown  what affects the information an academic publishes will have on the people they study, so it is best to error on the side of caution.

One of the ways that academia in this country takes care to ensure the ethical methods of researchers is mandating that they get IRB certification. In order to get the certification an applicant must first take an online course on ethics laws and regulations. It took me 2hrs of reading and quizzes, but I'm done with that portion of the certification. Now my linguistics advisor, Monica, will help me with the rest.

Another important process that I am trying to get done before classes start is finding out who my research advisor in India will be. Each student in India gets an advisor for their project. Usually they get them later in the semester, but I really want to be able to get started right away when i get to India, so I am trying to figure out who my advisor will be now. The most likely candidate at the time seems to be a professor at BHU(Banaras Hindu University) by the name of RB Misra. He is the only sociolinguist in their linguistics department, though a pragmatist might also do. I am trying to find articles he has written and his areas of interest, but being able to contact him would help.

Everything is becoming so much more solidified and real as the date of my departure approaches. Tickets are bought and my visa will soon be on its way... I'm starting to feel really passionate about my research again after I kinda put it off to the side last semester. Wish me luck!

My Research Topic

As of yet I do not have a specific outline for my research so I had better get myself in line and start doing some more research. My research question is: How do the speakers of Hindi and Urdu view their own languages and speech communities in Varanasi.
For those of you not familiar with Hindi-Urdu is a member of the Indo-Aryan language family which is a part of the Indo-European language family which English, Spanish and many other European languages belong to. There have been many scholarly and household theories as to the origins of Hindi-Urdu and the extent to which Hindi and Urdu are separate languages or the same language.  The most commonly held theory is that Hindi-Urdu is descended from Khari Boli, which was the spoken language in parts of Northern India. When the Mughals ruled India  from 1526, they used Persian as the court language for their empire. A highly Persianized version of Khari Boli, called Urdu, became the language of the elite. The spoken language of the non-elite also became highly Persianized and was called Hindustani. When the British colonized India, they used Urdu and Hindustani interchangeably.
The linguistic scenario upon the colonization of Northern India was not one of recognized discrete languages and Indians did not make a clear distinction between Hindi and Urdu as languages, they merely recognized that some Muslims used more Persian words and some Hindus used more Sanskrit-borrowed words. Anyone who studies the colonial history of India will tell you that the English liked to do surveys and put Indians in to categories that were much more ridged that the previously existing systems. They solidified cast and Indian law in this manner. In the same way they attempted to categorize the languages of India. This is the mindset that gave rise to the ideas of Hindi and Urdu as separate languages. In 1902, in Grierson's Linguistic survey of India he gathered linguistic data from over the whole country and divided it up into discrete languages. However the Indians themselves did not see their languages in this manner. One student at Banaras University said to his professor, “we do not clearly understand what you Europeans mean by the term Hindi, for there are hundreds of dialects, all in our opinion equally entitled to the name, and there is here no standard as there is in Sanskrit.” Since then however, the idea of Hindi and Urdu as separate languages has emerged. Muslims and the Persian script have generally been associated with Urdu. Hindus and the Devanagari script have been associated with Hindi. Hindi and Urdu however are so similar that most linguist do not make a distinction between then except at the sociolinguistic level. 
This is of course a very simplified version of the history of Hindi-Urdu, but I do not have time to go into depth. I will perhaps do so later. 
My research will be looking at modern day perceptions of the sociolects Hindi and Urdu, how they differ linguistically and socially and how the speakers view their language and the other group as well. The point of my research is not to study religious differences, but to study the power of culture and politics upon our views of language. I am really excited to see what viewpoints I will find in a religiously conservative and yet open city such as Varanasi. 
 

due to popular demand

Due to the fact that everyone has told me to do a blog while in India I have decided to do a blog about my year in India. For those of you who do not know about my impending odyssey... here's a little about what I am going to do in India and why.

I first heard about the study abroad program in India when I was a first semester freshman here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Instantly I felt that this program was for me. It was like an epiphany. All of a sudden I had a new goal in my life that needed to be accomplished. The program was a year long and was centered around a field work project of the participants choice. It was the field work project that drew me in. I have always dreamed of doing my own field research, without really knowing what I would do it on. Also the location of this program seemed perfect. It is my opinion that study abroad should be about taking a person out of their context. Karen Blixen said once that you can only know yourself when you take yourself out of your normal context, when all of the social markers that once meant something to you become meaningless, when people do not know that you are polite because you open the door for them or well dressed because you tuck your shirt in. Only then can you see what's left, which are the tings that make you really you. I feel like going back to Denmark, which had been my original plan upon entering college, would not give me ample opportunity to completely know myself. India however, particularly Varanasi, a city lost in time, would be the perfect place for soul searching.

So not, almost two years later, I am sitting here trying to work through visa applications and finish off some preliminary research. I leave on the 20th of August and it almost doesn't seem real. I am nervous for what I will discover about the world and myself, but mostly I am excited to embark on what will hopefully be a life changing journey. I have narrowed my research topic to a sociolinguistic survey of Urdu and Hindi language communities in Varanasi. I feel both ready and unprepared for my research. There is so much more to know. so much more that could be useful to my field research, and at the same time I have read so much already and I just want to jump in and begin finding informants doing elicitations. I have taken a year of Hindi and will take another two semesters this summer. This will hopefully be enough to let me conduct my research mainly in Hindi while in Varanasi. But more on my research later! I have a minigolf game to get ready for!