The Sindhis of Malaysia
Maya Khemlani David
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   This sociolinguistic study of the Sindhi-Hindu community in Malaysia investigates language maintenance and shift of this group. The Sindhis are an urban, ethnolinguistic minority comprising less than a thousand people in multilingual Malaysia. The author provides a detailed ethnography of communication in Sindhi homes in Malaysia. She focuses on generational changes in language choice preferences and code switching strategies.

   This study offers a substantial amount of systematically collected empirical data. Language choice in the home, intra-community interactions and in the public domain is investigated. The Sindhi community has shifted from Sindhi to an international language, English and, to some extent, Malay. However, the Sindhi language still has some functional uses and Sindhi words are retained in mixed English-Malay speech. This shift reflects the utilitarian and pragmatic attitude of this upwardly-mobile community.

About the Author

   MAYA KHEMLANI DAVID is an associate professor at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics in the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. Dr David’s research interest is in sociolinguistics with a special focus on the maintenance and shift of the languages of minority communities in Malaysia. She has researched language choices of both the Portuguese community in Malacca and the Tamil community in Kuala Lumpur. She is currently working on the language choices of the Punjabi-Sikh community in the Klang Valley.