Paper Title
LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND BILINGUALISM IN THE INDIAN MIGRANT CONTEXT IN SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

Abstract
Transnational migration has become a highly common phenomenon in the 21st century. Some countries, such as India are stronger sending countries while others, such as Australia are stronger recipients. Once migrants settle in the host country, their primary bridge connecting them to the home country and heritage culture is their heritage language. It keeps them connected with things that they had loved and cherished pre-migration and would like to remain connected with post-migration. If they lose proficiency in the heritage language, that damages the bridge and the relationship with their heritage culture, traditions, customs, religion, family and friends. The relationship weakens gradually and could result in total breakdown. However, despite the priceless roles played by heritage languages in migrants’ lives and the host country, there is a limitation of sociolinguistic research in this field in Australia. Some languages are more severely impacted than others, and Indian heritage languages are amongst the former, despite India being one of the top source countries for migrants to Australia with approximately 721,000 migrants recorded in the 2021census (ABS 2021). To fill in this gap, a PhD study has been conducted to explore the linguistic repertoire of Indian migrants residing in Sydney, Australia. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of research were employed where 168 first generation and 62 second-generation migrants participated in a survey. This was followed by semi-structured interviews and field observations. The software program SPSS was used to record and analyse the quantitative data. The data collected is used to deduce whether the first and second-generation Indian migrants in Sydney are maintaining their heritage languages or if language shift is in play. The results of the research showed that while first-generation Indian migrants are maintaining their heritage languages to a large extent, the second generation are more on the language shift trajectory albeit to different degrees in different domains and with different interlocutors. The high rate of language shift in the second-generation Indian migrants raises the question of whether they and the subsequent generations of Indian migrants will be able to maintain their heritage languages hence remaining bi- or multilingual in a transnational context, or if they are heading towards monolingualism. This presentation will speculate on this question by reporting on the data on Indian migrants’ self-evaluated skills in Hindi and an Indian regional language and their reported patterns of language use in the home domain. The presentation will also explore the agents of language maintenance in the Indian migrant context, as identified by the study. This presentation will be valuable for stakeholders and families in India, to conceptualize the Indian heritage language maintenance and/or shift trajectories in transnational contexts. Keywords - Indian Heritage Language, Linguistic Repertoire, Indian Migrants, Language Maintenance, Bilingualism, Multilingualism.