India is a highly multilingual nation, where many languages are spoken and also studied, both as part of linguistics and with the aim of aiding community development.
Though theoretical and comparative linguistics have a long history in the country (dating back to perhaps the first millennium BCE), few researchers have concentrated on the sociolinguistic situation of India.
[3] Ferguson (1959) first used the term "diglossia", whereby languages exhibit two or more distinct styles of speech in different contexts, and a number of studies looked into the phenomenon in more depth.
[3] Shanmugam Pillai attempted to analyse code switching among Kanyakumari fishermen (1968) with regard to the hierarchy of the caste structure.
[3] Other research into code switching has studied it in the context of minority-majority interactions, urban and tribal transactions, and other special settings.