Guest Lecture on Language Ecology and Contact in South Asia
Date:
This guest lecture, delivered for Astrid DeWit’s Spring 2025 class on Language Contact at UCLA, explored language ecology as a conceptual framework for understanding multilingual contact zones, with a focus on South Asia.
I walked through:
- Indian English as a nativized set of varieties
- South Asia as a contested linguistic area
- Language contact in the Eastern Himalayan region, including Nagaland
The presentation emphasized that language contact is not just a one-to-one process, but part of a complex, many-to-many web of sociolinguistic relationships shaped by history, geography, and social structure. I proposed that local ecologies are the best unit of analysis, not national or even areal groupings.
Download the slides: language ecology guest lecture (PDF)