Missing from the ‘minority mainstream’: Pahari-speaking diaspora in Britain Serena Hussain a,b * a The Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University, Casuarina, Australia; b School of Geography, Oxford University, Oxford, UK (Received 27 August 2013; accepted 16 July 2014) Pahari speakers form one of the largest ethnic non-European diasporas in Britain. Despite their size and over 60 years of settlement on British shores, the diaspora is shrouded by confusion regarding official and unofficial categorisations, remaining largely misunderstood as a collective with a shared ethnolinguistic memory. This has had implications for the recognition of Pahari within mainstream minority language provision. The first half of the article explores why Pahari has remained largely absent within discourse on minority languages in Britain. The second half of the article documents attempts from within the diaspora to address this gap through promoting and representing Pahari within a British context. Keywords: minority languages; language politics; diaspora; ethnic minorities; colonialism; media Introduction The Pahari-speaking population from Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir are one of the largest ethnic non-European diaspora communities in Britain. Despite their size and over 60 years of settlement on British shores, the diaspora remains shrouded by confusion regarding official categorisation and language status. There is a lacuna of academic literature engaging specifically with the Pahari-speaking population, and as such, they remain one of Britain’ s most misunderstood and underrepresented collectives with a shared ethnolinguistic memory (Haider 2013a). Pahari is seldom portrayed as a language in its own right within a British context. This is principally due to contemporary interpretations of geo-historical changes of provincial borders (Shackle 1979; Masica 1991) and externally generated definitions of the Pahar region (Rehman 2005; Haider 2013a, 2014). There has been an increase in Pahari language development and activism from within the diaspora, who assert the right to self-definition and reject external evaluations of their language heritage. This article contributes to the sociological study of Pahari in Britain. In doing so it explores arguments for why Pahari has remained largely outside official language categorisation and documents attempts from within the diaspora to promote and represent Pahari as a language in its own right. Prior to commencing discussion on language representation a brief overview of the diaspora under study is provided. *Email: serena.hussain@gmail.com Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2014.953539 © 2014 Taylor & Francis