Cross-talk and Language Crossing: Indian English, Interactional Sociolinguistics and Late Modernity

Abstract

This paper first describes the way in which fluent vernacular English-speaking adolescents of South Asian descent made strategic use of Indian English, and it compares this with the classic accounts of Asian-Anglo intercultural communication in interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, Roberts & Jupp 1979; Gumperz 1982a, 1982b). It identifies both continuities and developments, and then argues that in order to come to terms with late modernity, sociolinguistics needs to extend its conception of ethnicity. It points to the bias in linguistics towards system, coherence and community (Pratt 1987), and argues that the notion of ‘liminality’ may be valuable as a corrective, as a point of entry into debates about late modernity, as a concept in the analysis of micro-interaction, and as an unexplored dimension in intercultural communication.