This paper reports on a comparative case study of the multilingual practices of eight secondary teachers of English from across India, all identified as experts of their contexts using multiple criteria. Both qualitative and quantitative data from classroom observations, interviews and other sources were collected, analysed and compared across…

Scholars have long critiqued points of view in which monolingual perspectives are seen as normative in research on multilingualism. In relation to this "monolingual orientation," however, in which monolingualism is perceived to be the implicit norm, less work has been dedicated to methodological challenges. As disciplinary perspectives…

Most FLP research focuses on intrafamily communication (1FLP) and how this is impacted by larger contexts. But what happens when different multilingual families interact intensively on a daily basis? This article analyses language use during a holiday in India in and between four deaf-hearing befriended families, and how this evolved over the…

The present study examined the practice of language brokering (LB) among South Asian Canadian college-age adults and how such practice relates to acculturation to mainstream and heritage cultures, as well as personal empowerment. One hundred and twenty-four young adults reported on three different indices of LB (brokering frequency, diversity of…

Diasporic communities around the world regularly encounter challenges of preserving their identities and communication practices while adapting to their host social-cultural environment. Grounded in communication accommodation theory (CAT) and informed by recent research on deviance, this study investigated the relationships between Tibetan…

There have been few Australian studies of language maintenance amongst immigrant languages from the Indian subcontinent. The present study focuses on Tamil speakers in Melbourne from Sri Lanka or India, who are Hindus or Christians. Tamil is a pluricentric language that has been under the domination of English in these countries, at least amongst…

Safder Alladina's analysis of the position of South Asian languages in Britain leaves much to be desired, concerning itself largely with Urdu, Hindi to a lesser extent, and hardly at all with Bengali, Gujarati, and Panjabi. The problems and solutions of devising policies appropriate to these languages need to be discussed in greater detail. (CB)