ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an attempt to understand two ongoing linguistic changes caused by urbanization and mobility in multilingual and multicultural Kohima, the capital of Nagaland in India. It explores urban dynamics of language change in the rather small but highly diverse town of Kohima. There are several factors that make Kohima different from the larger urban centers of the Anglo-Western world, many of which are already multicultural or are increasingly becoming multicultural. The chapter presents the analysis based on conversational data collected during 2008 to 2009 and again in 2016 through interviews in the northern part of Kohima town. The older Konyak speakers have arrived relatively recently and have now spent about five years in Kohima. The chapter suggests that the multiple linguistic-cultural (migrant) communities need to be considered as relevant sociolinguistic constituents in studies of speech communities.
