ABSTRACT
This study focusses on the diasporic global Sindhi Hindu community who have shifted away from the dominant use of Sindhi. Many of the Sindhis had to flee from their one-time homeland, Sindh, in the wake of the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. As refugees in India and elsewhere they had to rebuild their lives from scratch. We will describe, examine, and determine the reasons for language shift to encourage revitalisation and its use. The reasons for such shift must be investigated prior to initiating revitalisation strategies. A revitalisation programme taking a bottom-up approach that explains the cause of the shift and links strategies to encouraging the use of Sindhi will be more fruitful compared to one that focusses merely on documenting and storing studies on an endangered language. Data come from the documented voices of Sindhis located in different parts of the world explaining why many do not use the Sindhi language. The strategies used recently immediately prior to and during the recent COVID-19 pandemic by activists to encourage language use come from information obtained from nightly webinars conducted by a number of activists from a range of mobile platforms. These strategies are analysed and discussed.
