ABSTRACT
In this chapter I take up three central themes on the consequences of migration and transnationalism for the sociolinguistics of speech and writing. These are (a) arguments against taking languages for granted as stable and located systems, (b) characterizing the personal and community management of multilingual resources in ethnically plural, but socially and politically hierarchical societies and (c) revisiting aspects of language shift vis-à-vis the changing nature of cultural and linguistic boundaries in a globalizing world. I examine these themes in relation to the history of a relatively clearly defined subgroup of the South African citizenry, viz. the Indian community of KwaZulu-Natal province, whose origins go back to the mid-nineteenth century. Itself characterized by internal fluidity via heritage languages and cultures, the community has also had to engage with the larger Zulu culture of the province and the socially dominant English culture. The study of specific Indian languages in South Africa from a socio-historical perspective has been undertaken since the 1980s (see e.g. Mesthrie [1991] on Bhojpuri-Hindi and Prabhakaran [1992] on Telugu). For the variety of English characteristic of this community, see e.g. Bughwan (1979) and Mesthrie (1992). In this chapter, I attempt to shift direction slightly by reflecting on the complex sociocultural and linguistic resources coexisting in the community, as partially reflected in the recent Dictionary of South African Indian English (Mesthrie 2010). In keeping with the thrust of this volume, I also focus on some community writing practices that veer away from those of a normative standard (though the latter of course is also significant in many domains).
