ABSTRACT
The role of language in shaping discussions of ethnicity and belonging across India’s Northeast remains under-studied and under-theorised. Despite record levels of linguistic diversity and a burgeoning number of language documentation projects that are active across the region, the politics of language and the language of politics in the Northeast are overdue for rigorous analysis as expressions and public displays of cultural identity.
This chapter—based on two decades of ongoing fieldwork in northern South Asia and the Himalayan belt—aims to redress this absence. While several of India’s states were officially reorganised along linguistic lines in 1956, the ‘Seven Sisters’ plus Sikkim were mostly untouched by the reclassification, and remain as linguistically heterogeneous as they are historically multilingual. Many of the region’s 45 million inhabitants are rapidly shifting from speaking traditionally unwritten and increasingly endangered Tibeto-Burman vernaculars to regional (Assamese, Nepali), national (Hindi) and international (English) Indo-European languages of prestige that carry with them the promise of economic benefit and digital access. Communities that were once plurilingual are rapidly becoming functionally bilingual, with the move from boli to bhasa appearing to be one of replacement rather than one of addition, a transformation that warrants careful analysis.
