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Introduction
India is made up of 29 states and 7 union territories. The country’s 1.25 billion people speak 15 officially recognized languages, and more than 1,600 mother tongues and dialects. After independence from the British in 1947, Indian leaders envisioned that Hindi could become the working language of the Union Government, so that it would facilitate regional communication, and encourage national unity. Presently, Hindi is the most widely spoken language, primary tongue of 41 per cent of Indians (Baldridge, 1996; CIA, 2016; Messner, 2009, p. 115), and often used as the common man’s link language (Katju, 2012). English is the primary language of only 230,000 Indians but is spoken by 86 million people in India as second and another 39 million as third language. English continues to enjoy the status of a subsidiary official language, it is the most important language for national and commercial communication, and it is the de-facto link language of the Indian elite (Katju, 2012). The Indian state of Karnataka has a population of about 61 million (Census-2011, 2015a). Karnataka’s official language is Kannada, which is spoken by 37.9 million people as a primary language; a further 11.5 million speak Kannada as a second language, and 1.4 million use it as a third language (TNN, 2010).
English is the most commonly used language for market research, surveys and customer feedback in India. But, as obvious from the above figures, it does not reach the subcontinent’s entire population. In addition, there is often a cultural sensitivity around the use of a particular language, and many Indians prefer to be addressed in their mother tongue. Using Indian languages in a market survey creates an opportunity to engage with different segments of the population, and potentially explore topics on a deeper level than one might achieve in English (Language Factory, 2016). And so, many questionnaires distributed in India are in English on one page, and in the most appropriate regional Indian language on the other side. Respondents are free to choose to reply to questions in the language they feel comfortable in.
However, this survey method presupposes that answers to items in a questionnaire are solely based on the substantive meaning of the items, and that they are not influenced by people’s language proficiencies...