Mapping Linguistic Innovation, Cultural Continuity, and Socio-Economic Disparity Across Indian States – A Culture Based Development Application

J. D. Prabhakar and Annie Tubadji

REGION, 2026, vol. 13, No 2, 135-150

Abstract: This study explores how language evolution and social reality meet in India's varied states. Adopting the Culture Based Development lens, we quantify local culture as two sub-types, cultural heritage (CH) and living culture (LC), and the balance between them (cultural entropy– CE), where the latter is theoretically expected to explain socio economic inequality between cultural groups in a place. Thus, the research explores how a culturally different balance across India is associated with socio-economic inequality across space. To achieve this, we use language as a proxy for cultural attitudes. Namely, by comparing the frequency of traditional cultural markers (`"Krishna") (approximating cultural heritage) to current linguistic innovations ("Influencer") (approximating living culture) we check the statistical association of these linguistic variables with measures for English language dominance and caste-wise unemployment. The findings indicate that, while living-culture-related terms increase their frequency over time, they have not yet superseded traditional cultural moorings, i.e., the cultural entropy in Indian places is still dominated by the cultural heritage component. Hence, we still observe local inefficiencies and inequalities in terms of structural unemployment especially among Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). The findings are explained from socio-linguistic and Myrdalian point of view.

Date: 2026
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