Ethnolinguistic Vitality, Social Identity and Inter Group Relationship in a Multilingual Contact Situation

Abstract

Indian language contact situations are multilingual in nature, due to presence of different cultural and linguistic groups. In majority of the Indian multilingual contact situations, language groups are not clearly divided under dimensions of dominant/ non-dominant, majority/minority, etc. In this backdrop the present paper makes an effort to understand the nature and dynamics of ethnolinguistic identity of three language communities of central Kolkata and their relationships with each other based on a study conducted in a language contact situation. The language groups taken for the study were English speaking Anglo-Indians, native Bengali speakers, and Urdu speaking Muslims of central Kolkata region. The study with help of theoretical principals of cross-cultural and social psychological perspectives tried to explore the dynamics of a multilingual contact situation, where none of the languages in the contact situation clearly fits the dimensions of majority/minority, dominant/non-dominant groups.