Himalayan Linguistics

This article re-examines a 2005-2006 school-based survey of language use across Sikkim, a multilingual Himalayan state in northeastern India. 16,527 students in classes VIII–XII from 105 schools answered questions about languages used with grandparents, parents, and siblings, and which they considered to be their “mother tongue”. Two patterns emerge from our reanalysis. Heritage languages are still used with elders, showing family-based maintenance. Yet everyday conversations among younger people increasingly shift to other languages—often those used in school and public life—especially in conversations between siblings. About one in nine parent pairs (11.24%) no longer use any of their parents’ languages, and about one in eight sibling groups (12.97%) use none of their parents’ languages. The “mother tongue” that students officially reported through the survey often differs from what they speak, highlighting a gap between linguistic identity and language practice. There are also regional variations: North Sikkim shows the strongest continuity; East and South show faster language shift; and the West sits somewhere between. Although school-based sampling and simple matching limit what we can deduce about language use, the directionality of language shift is clear: even though the parent generation know the languages of the grandparent generation and use them to communicate across the two generations, in many cases, they use other language(s) to communicate within their own generation. This is a significant finding, and the same pattern continues to the next generation. Going forward, we recommend strengthening vernacular teaching, expanding spaces for heritage languages, and repeating this survey each decade to track change across schools and communities, as well as to inform language policy.