This chapter is a historical overview of the maintenance and loss of heritage languages in ten waves of India's diaspora spread over six continents. Various factors that contributed to language maintenance and loss at the community level are discussed. The social and political conditions in the new homelands have played a significant role in preserving and losing the heritage languages. While some diasporic communities have held on to their heritage languages for generations, most of them lost them rapidly after relocating from their motherland. Fascination for western cultures has played havoc on immigrant languages. This chapter's discussion goes beyond the oft-debated factor of “attitude” and digs a little deeper to suggest that the real-life need for the language is the primary cause of language use and retention. If the need is lacking or even vague, the language gradually disappears. A real need for a language seems to be at the root of preventing language loss in immigrant communities. Toward the end, the paper presents a model of language advancement, language maintenance, and language revitalization.

This chapter concerns the life-histories of lingua francas, languages adopted for communication among speakers who do not otherwise share a language. It recognizes four principal motives for developing a lingua franca: commerce, conquest, religious conversion, and cultural attraction. A lingua franca depends for its survival on the continuation in force of one or other of these motives, unless some user population adopts it as a mother-tongue, passing it on in the home, or dropping it for one purpose only to take it up afresh for another: this is Regeneration. Other paths, for decline of a lingua franca, include Ruin or Resignation, if the user community dissolves, and Relegation, if the use of the language is deliberately banned. In this framework, the careers of major languages (excluding European empires) are narrated: Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek in West Asia; Greek (again) and Latin in the Mediterranean and Europe; the sprouting and interaction of languages before European conquests in the Americas, and in Africa; Sanskrit, Persian, and later Malay in Southeast Asia, the interplay of Putonghua with other Chinese dialects across East Asia; and the rise of Hindi-Urdu in South Asia.