North-East India
The project
Northeast India is a region of exceptional linguistic diversity within India, the world’s most populous nation and a rapidly growing economy. English and Hindi function as national lingua francas, with English more widely used in Northeast India compared to other regions, alongside Assamese as a regional lingua franca.
This project examines the linguistic ecology of Northeast India, using a stratified sample of 180 participants. Participants will complete detailed questionnaires about linguistic practices and attitudes, with 60 also participating in semi-structured interviews. These interviews will form part of a corpus for further analysis. We anticipate Dominant Language Constellations (DLCs) in Northeast India to feature more languages than other locales in the Research Unit, often involving English, Hindi, and Assamese.
Language repertoires and DLCs are expected to correlate with socioeconomic status, with lower- and middle-status speakers displaying larger repertoires influenced by their L1s and other languages. Migration is also expected to shape distinct DLCs. This study adds a critical perspective to under-researched linguistic diversity in Northeast India, shedding light on how India manages its multilingual ecology amidst rapid economic growth and historic marginalization.
These insights have global relevance for understanding linguistic diversity in evolving socio-economic contexts.
The team
Robert Fuchs is Chair of Bonn Applied English Linguistics (BAEL) at the University of Bonn and PI of the subproject "English as a local lingua franca in the multilingual ecology of Northeast India". His research interests are World Englishes/postcolonial varieties of Englishes, corpus linguistics, gender and language, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition (esp. speech learning, tense and aspect), corpus-based discourse analysis, social media, acoustic phonetics and laboratory phonology. Further information about his academic profile can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/rflinguistics/home.
Tjorven Halves is a PhD student at the University of Bonn. Her research interests are World Englishes, grammatical and sociolinguistic variation, mainly using corpus linguistic and quantitative approaches. Her PhD project is situated in the fields of World Englishes and multilingual ecologies. It will use data-driven, quantitative methods to model the influences of sociolinguistic dimensions of variation and dominant language constellations on spoken English in Northeast India.
Dr. Priyankoo Sarmah is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG). Among his research interests are phonetics, speech analysis, speech perception and speech technology development. For more information, please refer to: https://www.iitg.ac.in/hss/faculty_page_profile.php?name=dEFQVGVmQUwzMmJSeHlmaHBWUmFidz09