The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya

Although this book was written for a specialist audience of advanced scholars and doctoral students, the authors successfully link these specific cases to broader issues in sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, and political science. Hence this book will be of interest to scholars working on other contexts besides the Himalayan region; I am very pleased to see such a complex and interesting analysis of the politics of language contact.

The five main chapters and the editors’ introductory and closing essays of 'The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya' demonstrate that the history, present, and future of language contact and politics in the Himalayan region are complicated, nuanced, and changing. Each chapter provides a detailed empirical case study, while engaging with and building on theoretical concepts [...] This volume is well worth reading, both for the individual chapters and for the ways they comment on each other. The editors’ choice to publish it as an open access volume, available to read for free on the publisher’s website, ensures that it will be accessible to readers. This would be an obvious choice for area studies courses’ syllabi, but would also be appropriate for courses in sociolinguistics, language policy, and language contact and change.