Sylheti speakers and language heterotopias in London's East End

 
For this PDF I propose two main interconnected outputs: an academic monograph grounded in community-focussed research and a community exhibition grounded in sociolinguistic theory and practice. My motivation for this project grew out of the strong focus on stakeholder engagement and local participation during my PhD, an AHRC (CHASE) funded Collaborative Doctoral Award, conducted in close collaboration with community organisation, The Osmani Trust. Given this stakeholder involvement, I am committed to wide dissemination of the research, including reaching non-academic audiences with particular focus on the Osmani Trust and their local networks.
Although initially funded as part of an Arts and Humanities studentship, my PhD project has had a social science orientation from the outset. Situated in the subfield of sociolinguistics and rooted in traditions of linguistic anthropology, it links Sylheti language practices and ideologies to social life in public places. In the proposed monograph, I aim to strengthen this orientation by elaborating Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopia’ (1986:24) - spaces where normative discourses are upturned and counternarratives flourish. Building on Wang and Lamb’s (2024) application of heterotopia to language, I will explore its activist potential in challenging deficit discourses around multilingualism.
I will begin the monograph prior to the Fellowship start date with a book proposal, which includes two sample chapters, to Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism series, aiming to secure a contract by December. Should delays occur, I will begin work on the exhibition earlier and allocate more time for the monograph later in the Fellowship. If Routledge declines the proposal, I will submit it to Multilingual Matters.
In tandem with the book, I will curate an itinerant exhibition that interweaves ethnographic vignettes, photographs, voice and soundscape recordings with short walking route commentaries from my PhD fieldwork (Winstanley 2022), inviting visitors to explore threads in the thesis. Hosted by the Osmani Trust, it will launch on UNESCO Mother Language Day in 2027.
Sylheti is widely spoken in east London but is often positioned as a ‘home language’ with little relevance for social life outside and, like with other racialised minority languages, it is at the sharp end of negative tropes about multilingualism. My research challenges these discourses, showing that Sylheti is integral to local communication practice - often central, sometimes peripheral, rarely entirely absent, with repertoires continually changing in response to shifting patterns of daily life and new migrations. The work is situated in London’s East End, whose geographical position at the entrance to the Port of London makes it historically important as a place of migration and language change. This work however, also focuses on continuity- on Sylheti as an established local East End language.
The Fellowship gives opportunities for considerable educational impact. Building on my background in Further and Teacher Education, and current experience with The Brilliant Club, I aim to produce a portable exhibition kit, using facsimiles of the exhibition, to develop workshops and materials for schools and colleges.
This project contributes to ethnographic work on language in London’s East End (Hoque 2015, Rajina 2024). Additionally the combination of ethnographic description, theory and multi-stranded engagement via monograph, exhibition and education work, will be a substantial contribution to activist sociolinguistics (e.g. Tlang, Lytra et al 2022; Matras 2024), offering new conceptual and practical support for language diversity, heritage language maintenance and sociolinguistic justice.