Towards a Monolingual World

The chapter looks into the existing language equation in India through a literary lens. Even though the number of translations from other Indian languages to English has increased, in the national and international market Indian English fiction has come to represent Indian fiction. This complexity is due to the growing status of English in globalized India, which is also reflected in the popularity of Indian English fiction. However, a historical analysis would reveal that the rise of Indian English fiction is a postcolonial phenomenon and this has been at the expense of translations. The chapter substantiates this cultural evolution further through a study of the Malayalam translation of the Indian English novel The God of Small Things and the English translation of the Malayalam novel Chemmeen. The translation strategies and iconography of the book covers are analyzed to discuss the existing equation between English and other Indian languages.

From Quasispecies to Universal Grammar

The perspective of this paper is to compare mathematical models for the evolutionary dynamics of genomes and languages. The quasispecies equation describes the evolution of genetic sequences under the influence of mutation and selection. A central result is an error threshold which specifies the minimum replication accuracy required for maintaining genetic information of a certain length. The language equation describes the evolution of communication, including the cultural evolution of grammar and the biological evolution of universal grammar. A central result is a coherence threshold which specifies certain conditions that universal grammar has to fulfill in order to induce coherent communication in a population.