The History of LRU

 

The Linguistic Research Unit (LRU) was established by Professor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanabis, the Founder-Director of Indian Statistical Institute, in 1940’s or even earlier. The main research activity of the Unit during that time was related to analysis of frequency of occurrence of words in vocabularies of prominent Bengali authors like Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Saratchandra Chattopadhyaya and others. These studies were an innovation in Indian Linguistics and Professor Mahalanabis’ plan to apply statistical technology to linguistic data analysis and interpretation was an extremely modern one, particularly in the Indian perspective. These works on the Bengali vocabulary had tremendous relevance in studies on linguistic usage in Bengali and also for linguistic as well as stylistic predictions. The objectives were three-fold: working towards a basic Bengali primer based on colloquial Bengali; preparing graded word list for use in textbooks for children in three different age groups, and studying vocabularies of representative authors from stylometric point of view. The present scopes and domains of research and development actitivites of the Unit are available from the following link: http://www.isical.ac.in