This chapter has three main objectives. This chapter first describes multilingualism as a natural force, deeply rooted in Asian and African societies prior to the emergence of nation-states and currently flourishing and evolving in India. Parts 2– 4 of this chapter provide evidence from pre-colonial India and its neighboring countries to underscore the differential evolution of Indian and Chinese political multilingualism in both qualitative and quantitative terms. The chapter closes by investigating the dynamics of linguistic, non-linguistic, and cultural forces in Southeast Asia and China, forces that shaped, sustained, and spread pre-and post-fifteenth-century Indian multilingualism in and outside India. Super-diversity is a key marker of Ancient as well as Modern India. This region represents a microcosm of different languages, races, religions, and cultures that have blended and brought about a special unity in diversity. The chapter shows that sustainable and stable Indian multilingualism defies the conventional belief that multilingualism cannot survive or flourish without a writing system and/or government intervention. Salient linguistic and ecological features are identified to highlight the exceptional nature of Indian multilingualism and its spread to Southeast Asia and China.

Users of natural sign languages such as South African Sign Language (SASL) resist the influence of phonetically based languages such as English that are spoken by hearing people. However, languages that come into regular contact interfere with each other, with the dominant language creating greater interference in the non-dominant language than vice versa. In the case of sign languages, this interference is proposed to manifest in the predominance of SVO sentence structure, mouthing (full or partial miming of spoken words), increased emotive rather than grammatical use of facial features (e.g. brow actions) and increased use of artificial signs, nonce words and fingerspelling. This study explores these interference features in a pioneer corpus project consisting of news broadcasts interpreted into SASL by two hearing interpreters (native SASL users). A discussion of how phonological, grammatical, syntactic and discourse features of SASL differ from their English counterparts is followed by a discussion of the corpus and relevant annotations. The results show high frequencies of SV sentence constructions and mouthings, and relatively high frequencies of fingerspelling, artificial signs and nonce words; brow actions are more resistant to interference.