This study investigates language attitudes expressed by public university students in India at various layers of agentive "positionality" as an integral part of their dynamic language ecologies. This is achieved through the qualitative analysis of three focus group interviews conducted at three public universities in India with the…

India is currently home to one of the world's largest English-speaking communities, in a context where the language is increasingly seen as a gateway to the world. Given the plurality of the country's social and linguistic landscape, however, a significant amount of the population does not speak or have access to the language. The impact of…

Within the spirit of conspiration, this article brings together contributions from participants of the PhD-led UCL Reading and React Group 'Colonialism(s), Neoliberalism(s) and Language Teaching and Learning', which ran in 2019/20. Weaving together various perspectives, the article centres on the dialogic nature of the decolonial enterprise and…

The rise of English as a global lingua franca and the increasing use of it into the multilingual and multicultural contexts appear to be further indexing a number of new issues. These issues include from the discussion of its ownership -- that it is no longer only the language of native speakers of it, as statistically non-native speakers make up…

This paper examines emerging forms of multilingualism and multiliteracy in rural India (where the term "literacy" is used broadly here to include digital media literacy and marketing literacy as well as literacy in the traditional sense of the knowledge of a writing system). Here forces of globalization and digital communication have…

Today's English language teaching goes beyond the norms of English spoken and taught in native-English-speaking countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, or Australia. Increasingly, a variety of countries have established, formally or informally, a kind of English unique to their own populations, and English language teachers within…

Discusses the linguist's role in an adult education program and the need to define adult functional literacy. Describes communication problems with the many dialects and language variations in a multilingual country like India and explains that the linguist must help the literacy worker to integrate language and literacy with adult education. (MF)

Indian languages seem to have emerged from a phase of total dependence on English for new input. Several Indian languages have now evolved vocabularies and structural nuances to handle several new registers and styles necessary for modern society. Some of the change has occurred through conscious language policy encouraging multilingualism and the…

This paper is a study in language acculturation with special reference to the Indianization of the English language. It briefly traces the history of the diffusion of bilingualism in English on the culturally and linguistically pluralistic Indian subcontinent. The functional roles of English are discussed and the formal influences of Indian…

The notion of language dependency presupposes that there is a hierarchy of languages in a multilingual society, and that each language is assigned a functional role in a multilingual individual's restricted or extended spheres of linguistic interaction. In South Asia, language dependency has resulted in linguistic convergence of two types: (1)…

The English spoken in India is too close to standard English to be characterized as a separate variety. Although phonological variations give English in India some regional flavors, they do not have any structural or semantic base and do not constitute a new language. Cultural differences have not caused English-language literature written in…