Gesture as a Visual Language

Amol K Patil, e-flux Journal, Issue #141, December 15, 2023

My mother tongue is Marathi.1 But I grew up with the Bambaiya language, a mixture of Hindi and Marathi commonly spoken by the people of Bombay (now called Mumbai). In Maharashtra, the second-largest state in India, Marathi is the official language. It is spoken by over eighty-four million people.2 If you travel from one region of Maharashtra to another, and even if you go just a few kilometers between areas, you will hear different intonations of the Marathi language spoken by an ever-changing mixture of locals. Sometimes people from one area who hear the language as it is spoken elsewhere—even nearby—find it funny.

 

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