Project Details
Projekt
English as a local lingua franca in the multilingual ecology of Northeast India
Applicant
Professor Dr. Robert Fuchs
Subject Area
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528506225
India is not only a highly multilingual country, but also the most populous nation, with the world’s fifth-largest, and rapidly growing, economy. Northeast India is a region of topographic extremes, which has helped it retain an even more exceptional linguistic diversity. At the same time, it holds a position as an exotic ‘other’ in the Indian imagination, contributing to a lack of scholarship on the region. English and Hindi play an important role as a local and national lingua franca in the region and English is, overall, more widely used in Northeast India than the rest of the country. Moreover, Assamese also functions as regional lingua francas. This project will explore the linguistic ecology of Northeast India, based on a methodology closely aligned with the overall Research Unit. A socially and demographically stratified sample of 180 participants will be asked to provide detailed information on their linguistic practices and attitudes in a detailed questionnaire, of which 60 participants will take part in a more detailed, semi-structured interview. These interviews will be recorded and subsequently compiled into a corpus. We expect that Dominant Language Constellations (DLCs) comprise, on average, a greater number of languages in Northeast India than most of the other locales investigated in the Research Unit. These DLCs will usually involve at least one of the three regional lingua francas English, Hindi and Assamese. As in the other locales of the Research Unit, acquired languages are expected to have higher likelihood of being included in a speaker’s DLC than learned ones. Language repertoires and DLCs are also contingent on socioeconomic status. Speakers from lower and middle economic status are expected to have larger language repertoires and DLCs. Their English is less likely to adhere to the emerging norms of acrolectal Indian English and is more likely to show influence from their L1s and other languages compared to speakers of high economic status. Migration is also expected to be an important factor, although Northeast India is not subject to the substantial recent migration in metropolises such as Mumbai and Delhi. In-migrants in Northeast India are expected to have distinct DLCs, depending on their regional origin. This project adds to the Research Unit a locale that is currently under-researched and of exceptional linguistic diversity. At the same time, the intended analysis of the multilingual ecology of Northeast India will reveal how the world’s most populous country deals with linguistic diversity in the context of economic growth, rapid development, as well as a history of neglect by the central government. Due to its economic and demographic importance, the way how India and Indians approach their multilingual ecology and linguistic diversity is likely to have repercussions on a global scale.
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