Mother Tongue Prestige: The Sociolinguistics of Privilege in Urban Middle‐Class Education in India By Jessica SujataChandras, London and New York: Routledge. 2023. 216 pages

Jessica Sujata Chandras's Mother Tongue Prestige offers a theoretically rich and ethnographically grounded account of how language becomes a site through which caste, class, gender, and educational aspiration are organized.The central argument is that language cannot be treated as a neutral medium of communication.It is a form of social and cultural power that shapes educational mobility, reproduces privilege, and creates new forms of distinction.Through the case of Marathi, a regional language spoken in Pune, Maharashtra, especially debates around the mother tongue and the idea of shuddh, or "pure," Marathi, Chandras shows how linguistic value is produced through language history, institutional practice, and everyday language aspiration.The study is structured through a grammatical metaphor, with two sections titled "Nouns" and "Verbs."The first section establishes the conceptual and historical foundation by examining the political economy of language, language ideology, aspirational mother-tongue prestige, and the cultural compensation attached to linguistic identity.It demonstrates that English education in India did not emerge as a neutral educational choice.Rather, it became closely linked to caste and class location, particularly among groups that already possessed social and cultural capital.English therefore added another layer to existing hierarchies while presenting itself as a language of merit, mobility, and modernity.A key strength of the analysis lies in its ability to connect students, teachers, and parents within a single field of linguistic aspiration.This enables Chandras to show that language ideology is not produced in one location alone.It circulates across schools, homes, peer groups, and intergenerational language expectations.The framework of "aspirational prestige" is especially useful because it explains how desires for mobility are expressed through language choices, accents, medium of instruction, and claims over linguistic purity.The study therefore contributes to debates on how elite groups secure access to Englishmedium education while also claiming cultural authority over the mother tongue.The historical transformation of the mother tongue is central to this argument.The mother tongue debate gradually became tied to prestige for those groups that already had access to linguistic capital.As a result, contemporary aspirations around the mother tongue have reshaped its meaning within educational settings.