Horizontal Multilingualism: Interview with Shobha Satyanath

In this interview, Shobha Satyanath, one of India's premier sociolinguists, reflects on her career working on language variation and change in India and Guyana. The interview starts with a definition of what sociolinguistics is, namely, a social theory of language, and then continues to trace the development of Indian sociolinguistics. Satyanath also shares insights into the ideas behind the conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation Asia-Pacific and the associated journal Asia-Pacific Language Variation. From her and her students’ work on a range of Indian languages, it becomes clear that certain frameworks developed in Western sociolinguistics, such as diglossia, or what she also calls a hierarchical model of bilingualism, do not work to accurately account for the multicultural fabric of Indian and Guyanese societies. Satyanath proposes to understand multilingualism in a horizontal and harmonious way.