BILINGUALISM IN SOUTH ASIA (INDIA): NATIONAL/REGIONAL PROFILES AND VERBAL REPERTOIRES Kamal K. Sridhar 1. INTRODUCTION Anyone who undertakes to do an overview of so large an area as studies on "the South Asian bilingual's verbal repertoire and the functional allocation of languages" within so small a space as permitted by this review deserves her predicament. The problem lies in the complexity and diversity of the situ- ation, and the danger of inanity resulting from oversimplification. However, since the alternative is to wait for book-length treatments which have yet to be written, and in the meanwhile, suffer the omission of a prime example of a multilingual region from a volume devoted to multilingualism, I shall compro- mise by treating only the broadly representative situations and trends and ignoring the (sometimes more interesting) particularities of a given language or an individual contact situation. Caveat lector. 1.1. Salient features of South Asian bilingualism The salient features of bilingualism in South Asia include: (a) the fluidity of language identity, leading to the under-reporting and variable reporting of the extent of bilingualism in the area; (b) the high degree of societal bilingualism, not only in border areas and among the educated population, but also on a very widespread scale among the population in general; (c) the high incidence of polyvarietalism and multilingualism, involving regional, social (e.g., caste, occupation, etc.), and institutional- ized (e.g., diglossic) varieties on the one hand, and cognate languages as well as unrelated languages, on the other; (d) the widespread use of "mixed" language varieties; (e) the phenomenon of linguistic convergence (i.e., the tendency for languages in contact to adopt one another's formal features, resulting in the formation of the South Asian "linguistic area"); and (f) the tendency on the part of minority language speakers to maintain their languages, despite a low level of literacy and inadequate formal language instruction. For more general discussions of South Asian bilingualism, see Emeneau (1974), Gumperz (1958; 1961), Kachru (1979; 1982), Kachru and Sridhar (1978), 169