The persistent dichotomy between formalist conceptions of language as an autonomous cognitive system (Chomsky, 1965; Hauser et al., 2002) and functionalist approaches emphasizing its socio-interactional nature (Gumperz, 1982; Tomasello, 2003) has generated theoretical tensions that continue to shape disciplinary boundaries. This conceptual bifurcation, while historically productive, may now constrain comprehensive understandings of linguistic phenomena that inherently span both cognitive and social domains. Emerging evidence from neurolinguistics (Pulvermüller, 2018) and developmental psycholinguistics (Kuhl, 2007) demonstrates that the neural substrates of language processing are profoundly sensitive to social-contextual variables, while variationist sociolinguistics (Eckert, 2012) reveals unexpected systematicity in socially conditioned alternations. These empirical findings problematize traditional distinctions between competence and performance, suggesting instead that linguistic knowledge is constituted through dialogic interaction (Linell, 2009). The acquisition process itself appears to involve continuous feedback loops between cognitive predispositions and social-environmental inputs (Clark, 2016), rendering artificial any strict separation between "internal" linguistic system and "external" linguistic practice.

This framework challenges us to re-examine South Asian languages-with their exceptional diversity and complex sociolinguistic ecologies - as critical sites for unifying theoretical and empirical approaches. The theme "Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to South Asian Languages" seeks work that leverages the region’s multilingualism, contact phenomena, and grammatical innovations to test and refine a comprehensive theory of language that accounts for its dual nature as both a cognitive system and a social practice by recognizing that linguistic structure emerges from, and is fundamentally shaped by, recurrent patterns of interaction moving beyond the system/use divide by treating language as a complex adaptive system that is simultaneously psychologically real and socially constituted.