Khalapur

Khalapur Khalapur
town

Khalapur is a census town in Panvel subdivision of Raigad district in the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is a suburb of Karjat. It is an industrial area with many chemical, plastic and steel units.

It is Toll Collection Station on Mumbai-Pune Expressway on from Mumbai-Pune direction travel and one of the five interchange points on it.

Liguistic Research

Khalapur is well-known internationally to those involved in sociolinguistics, as a place where one of the earliest studies of the relationship between social differences and dialect differences was carried out by John Gumperz.

Gumperz chose Khalapur as a place to study speech patterns due to its being a small, highly stratified community. In all, Khalapur has 31 castes, ranging from Brahmans and Rajputs at the top, to Chamars and Bhangis at the bottom, and 90% of the overall population was Hindu, with the remaining 10% Muslim. Gumperz observed that the different castes were distinguished both phonologically and lexically, with each caste having a vocabulary specific to their subculture. Remarkably, the speech differences between Hindus and Muslims "are of the same order as those between individual touchable castes and certainly much less important than the variation between touchables and untouchables".

Gumperz also observed that the lower prestige groups sought to imitate the higher prestige speech patterns, and that over time, that had caused the evolution of the prestige away from the regional standard, as higher prestige groups sought to differentiate themselves from lower prestige groups. Gumperz concluded that in determining speech patterns in this community, "the determining factor seems to be informal friendship contacts", rather than work contacts.