Written school advertising in Banaras, a North
Indian city, creates correspondences between a language activity
and central and peripheral places. In spoken discourse, complex
relationships inhere between ways of describing languages as
varieties and the sociological value that is said to exist in
the fit between a language variety and its domain of use. Education
is one such domain because the educational system itself is
organized in popular discourse by medium, Hindi or English.
In spoken discourse, Hindi- or English-medium schools can indicate
central or peripheral dispositions. Advertising, however, includes
a meaningful element unavailable to speakers in the flow of
interaction – a distinction between lexical designation
and its rendering in Devanagari or roman script. Therein lies
its power to establish English as central and Hindi as
peripheral.
