Multilinguality, Vitality, and Endangerment

Languages are not simply lost: they are displaced by historical, economic, and political forces. Yet dominant models for assessing language vitality often fail to account for the resilience and adaptability of multilingual communities. This book challenges these conventional narratives by offering a rich, ethnographic exploration of the Toda and Kota communities of the Nilgiris.Through extensive fieldwork, this book reveals why Toda is experiencing rapid decline while Kota remains resilient, demonstrating that language endangerment is not an inevitable outcome of modernization, but rather a consequence of systemic marginalization. Moving beyond current language vitality frameworks, it proposes a language ecology perspective; one that acknowledges multilingualism as a sustainable norm and highlights the structural inequalities driving linguistic displacement.By bridging sociolinguistics, Indigenous studies, and language policy, this book provides fresh insights into oral traditions, power structures, and speaker agency. Essential for linguists, policymakers, and language rights advocates, it redefines how we assess linguistic survival, advocating for a more just and context-sensitive approach to sustaining linguistic diversity in India and beyond.