This chapter reviews the history, culture and politics of South Asian languages in the UK. South Asian migration to the UK dates back to the British colonial period. It expanded in the twentieth century, first with British Indian participation in the two World Wars and then with post-war British policies that initially encouraged South Asian immigration for low-skilled labour. South Asian communities in Britain share some characteristics but differ markedly in other respects. Overall, sustained migration, relatively large settlements, and a reduction in the early explicit hostility to migrants has meant that South Asian speech communities have tended to maintain their languages, though with inroads by English in each successive generation. South Asian languages initially struggled to be included in school curricula and university provision. Some languages, such as Urdu and Arabic, have wider religious or cultural appeal and see much higher uptake through education than other South Asian languages, even languages with more native speakers. Almost no research has been conducted on structural change within South Asian heritage languages, a rich area for future research on language contact and generational change.

In this chapter, I focus on the Bengali-language Arshinagar (2015) directed by Aparna Sen, and the Hindi-language Dhadak (2018) written and directed by Shashank Khaitan. Both films are adaptations of Romeo and Juliet that place the play within the context of current socio-political issues of communalism and honour killings in India.

This chapter presents the motivation and methodology of a cross-linguistic and cross-generational study of DOM in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian as heritage languages. Innovative aspects of this project are the comparison of the same linguistic phenomenon cross-linguistically and in heritage languages that share the same majority language context and the inclusion of adult first generation immigrants to examine the cross-generational component. By including heritage speakers and first-generation immigrants as well as two generations of native speakers in the homeland, we examine whether changes with DOM are observed in both diaspora and homeland contexts, or only in the diaspora context. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the linguistic and situational factors that contribute to DOM erosion within and across languages. The rest of this chapter presents the research questions, more specific hypotheses and the overall methodology.

The study presented in this book focuses on the acquisition, maintenance and change of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish, English and Romanian in contact with English in the United States. Differential Object Marking (DOM) is the overt marking of some direct objects and is a widespread among languages of the world. DOM is an iconic procedure because the arguments that are overtly marked morphologically are more salient/prominent semantically or pragmatically than unmarked objects. This chapter describes how DOM is manifested in Spanish, Romanian and Hindi and presents current syntactic synchronic analyses of the phenomenon in these languages. The diachronic evolution of DOM in language contact situations is also discussed.

This chapter brings together the findings from the three studies, which confirmed that Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a vulnerable grammatical area not only in Spanish, but also in Hindi and Romanian as heritage languages, subject to erosion under pressure from, English in this case. This chapter goes deeper into these overall trends, by comparing the three heritage speaker groups, on the one hand, and the three first-generation immigrant groups, on the other, on several background variables related to patterns of language use. A follow-up replication study with Spanish heritage speakers and immigrants from other countries in Latin America is reported, which confirm the attrition effects in the two generations of Mexican immigrants. It is claimed that his finding is strong evidence that while DOM omission may have started as a developmental outcome of heritage language acquisition, it may be on its way to becoming a stable dialectal feature of Spanish in the United States, suggesting language change with respect to DOM in Spanish. The roles of language internal and language external factors are discussed.

Detective or crime fiction has had a long and varied history in South Asia, at times inflected by local concerns, at other times transporting readers into a world of international intrigue. This chapter traces its development from its colonial origins under the aegis of a local boom in print media, ‘intrusive’ colonial law and policing and the influx of European narratives combined with precolonial tropes. The chapter focuses on iconic ‘homegrown’ detectives like Byomkesh Bakshi in the 1930s, the quintessential Bengali gentleman detective engaged in the high pursuit of truth, the debonair detectives Faridi and Imraan created by Indo-Pakistani writer Ibne Safi in the 1950s–1970s, and the heroes of ‘hard-boiled’ Hindi crime fiction in the 1970s–1990s. Crime fiction has also allowed women writers to imagine bold female detectives who challenge and debate gender norms, from Kamala Satthianadhan’s trailblazing Detective Janaki (1934) to Sujatha Massey’s Perveen Mistry. Crime fiction in South Asia has been intensely translational, not just from English but also across South Asian languages. It has pioneered its own distribution channels and spawned adaptations across media platforms.

This chapter provides a brief overview of efforts to promote heritage and community language education among two of the fastest growing newly emerging minority populations in the United States, that is, those who fall broadly under the labels of “Chinese” and “Indian” language communities in the United States. San Francisco has been one of the major centers of Chinese immigration to the United States since the nineteenth century and has emerged as one of the major centers for more recent Chinese immigration. Indian immigration has also rapidly increased since 1965, and the greater Washington, DC metropolitan area represents one of the key urban areas for the growth of South Asian populations. Each of these ethnolinguistic communities in the United States is not homogenous because they all reflect the linguistic diversities of their respective homelands. In addition, they also reflect the influence of the large Diasporas of Chinese and Indian populations around the globe.

In this study, segmental and prosodic properties of word-length stimuli were assessed together. Six talkers from 5 L1 backgrounds (American English, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, and Spanish) were recorded reading English stop-initial trochaic words. The productions were played for 20 monolingual American English-speaking listeners rated the accentedness of each talker. For each token, the deviation from native English productions was determined for segmental (VOT, vowel quality) and three prosodic properties (ratios of duration, intensity, f0 across the two syllables). For each non-native language background, a linear mixed-effects regression model was created to predict accentedness ratings from the phonetic deviations, and the significance of each fixed effect was examined. In each model, the significant predictors included both segmental and prosodic properties. For Hindi and Spanish talkers, the single best predictor was segmental; however, for Korean and Mandarin talkers, the single best predictor was prosodic. Thus, even for short stimuli, both segmental and prosodic information must be considered in accounting for accentedness judgments. We conclude that listeners are sensitive to the different ways that foreign accent may be manifested across different non-native backgrounds.

In this chapter, the author describes language as a location and the site of belonging, as well as a political tool for the empowering of one linguistic over another within a particular province and nation. It also describes the struggle to link Muslims with Urdu, thereby isolating both and deepening existing fractures in society, alongside attempts to privilege Sanskrit over all other ancient and modern languages.

As kayasths, the protagonists of this story were part of a community of archetypical professionals, who served various Indo-Islamic and even colonial regimes in India. This chapter examines the notion of professionalisation, reflecting on the conflicting aspirations of this landed martial family, for whom martial Rajputs offered the most immediate and attractive social and cultural model.This chapter examines a family history, re-written several times, in different scripts, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; family trees in multiple scripts; and a petition presented to colonial authorities in the early twentieth century, all of which members of the family used in trying to explain and justify the origins of their wealth and status. The chapter also looks at other specialists, who enabled and structured such claims, such as Islamic judges (qazis), Muslim and non-Muslim scribes (munshis), and specialist traders, connecting what is known of the social location and professional orientation of each group with the functions they evidently performed in the story of this family.