English Language, Migration, and Identity: A Comparative Study of Multilingual Urban Communities in India

Anindra Kumar Biswas

Assistant Professor (Stage 2)

The Department of English

Raiganj Suredranath Mahavidyalaya (College)

North Dinajpur, Pin -733134, West Bengal, India

Abstract— Internal migration has intensified linguistic contact within Indian cities, creating urban spaces in which English interacts continuously with regional languages, Hindi, and migrant home languages.
This study examines how English functions not merely as a communicative resource but as a marker of occupational mobility, urban belonging, social distance, and negotiated identity among multilingual migrant populations. A distinctive research gap is identified in the limited integration of migration studies, sociolinguistics, and computational language analysis for examining identity formation across multiple Indian urban environments. The study proposes a comparative computational sociolinguistic framework for analysing naturally occurring multilingual speech, code-switching patterns, identity-related narratives, and contextual English usage among migrant communities.
Rather than treating English proficiency as a single measurable attribute, the framework conceptualizes English use as a context-sensitive linguistic practice that changes across professional, domestic, institutional, and digital settings. Recent advances in multilingual natural language processing provide new possibilities for identifying language transitions, semantic identity markers, sentiment, stance, and conversational accommodation within linguistically mixed data.
Keywords— multilingualism, English language, internal migration, urban identity, code-switching, computational sociolinguistics

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