ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1538482
This article is part of the Research TopicAcquisition, Processing, and Maintenance of a New Language: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Sequential Bi/MultilingualismView all 12 articles
Heritage, Multilingualism, Education: The Complexity of Language Acquisition in India
Provisionally accepted
- Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
India is a profoundly diverse nation state where constitutional provisions for two official and 22 Scheduled languages overlay a vast substratum of numerous Non-Scheduled languages and over a thousand distinct mother tongues, creating a rich and layered linguistic hierarchy. The trajectory of linguistic growth of young Indians is invariably multilingual and multidialectal and involves at least an L1 followed most often by Hindi and English or other languages. We carried out a qualitative study with over 1300 first-year students entering a university based on a modified LEAP questionnaire on which to measure self-assessment of fluency, literacy, domain of use, and time course of language acquisition and loss. We explore the interaction between heritage language, multilingualism, and the formal (trilingual) education policy and show that they intersect to redraw the linguistic profiles of individuals with shifting language dominance with adverse consequences for their linguistic ability, especially in L1. We also find that the understanding of 'heritage language' needs to be more nuanced in this particular context of multilingualism and language acquisition.
Keywords: Heritage1, Multilingualism2, education3, acquisition4, policy5
Received: 02 Dec 2024; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sarma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Vaijayanthi M. Sarma, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.