Sylheti is a minoritised, politically unrecognised, and understudied Eastern Indo-Aryan language with approximately 11 million speakers worldwide, with high speaker concentrations in the Surma and Barak river basins in north-eastern Bangladesh and south Assam, India, and in several diasporic communities around the world (especially UK, USA, and Middle East). This paper briefly describes the Sylheti language from a variety of historical, socio-cultural, political, and linguistic angles, with a focus on the context of the Sylheti spoken among diaspora speakers living in London, which is the home base of the SOAS Sylheti Project (SSP), also introduced here, that helped facilitate some of the research presented in the papers comprising this volume.
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Simard et al. (2022) studied this question.