English in the Indian Diaspora

Download or read book English in the Indian Diaspora written by Marianne Hundt and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diasporic populations offer unique opportunities for the study of language variation and change. This volume is the first collection of sociolinguistic studies of English use across the historically complex and widely dispersed Indian diaspora. The contributions describe particular sociohistorical contexts (the UK, Fiji, South Africa, Singapore, and the Caribbean) and then use this rich empirical base to examine diverse questions in theory and method, such as the extent to which different settings see different or similar linguistic outcomes; the role of community structures, transnational ties, attitudes, and identity; reasons for differing rates of change, adaptation, and focussing; and the relevance of endonormative stabilization of Asian Englishes. These themes do not simply further our understandings of diaspora. They can ultimately feed into wider theoretical questions in language contact studies, including universals, selection and adaptation of traits, and interactions between social contact, identity, and language change.