Linguistic Diversity in South Asia, Reconsidered

Abstract

In this entry, we reconsider the topic ofLinguistic Diversity in South Asia– the title of the landmark 1960 volume edited by Charles Ferguson and John Gumperz – from the perspective of contemporary sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Reviewing a number of case studies, we argue that empirical and theoretical accounts of language, diversity, and South Asia cannot be disassociated from the ideologies and political projects that construe, objectify, and performatively realize such terms and their referents. At the same time, however, contemporary linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics have not disposed of the questions that animated earlier generations' investigations into linguistic diversity in the subcontinent but have reinvigorated and transformed them in sophisticated ways that are empirically sensitive to the realities of social and linguistic life in all its complex reflexivity.