Focusing on Bharatiya (Indian) languages, this conference aims to address a research gap by bringing together structural and sociolinguistic approaches to grammar within a complex multilingual ecology. The conference will engage with the issues related to ‘sociosyntax’ from diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives, concentrating on:

(a) Social grammar in South Asia: How do syntax, region, gender, and multilingual repertoires shape syntactic variation and change? How are features such as differential argument markers, honorification, agreement, and classifier systems socially indexed in major and understudied languages and contact zones, beyond speech-act dichotomies? 

(b) Sociolinguistic and anthropological frameworks that focus on specific linguistic form and their function, such as registers, urban and rural varieties, among others. Particular emphasis will be placed on ethnographically grounded studies that demonstrate how syntactic choices are embedded in everyday interaction and identity construction. 

(c) Formal linguistic framework examining how social meaning is integrated into grammar and contributing to the understanding of interfaces such as syntax-semantic-sociolinguistics. This includes work on clause types, agreement systems, and the encoding of speaker–addressee relations within formal models. Special focus will be given to how interface phenomena mediate between structural constraints and socially interpretable meaning. 

(d) Computational, Experimental, and Corpus-based approaches to detect and analyze the nature of Bharatiya socio-syntactic variation. 

(e) Bharat as a sociosyntactic area: How does long-term language contact shape sociosyntactic systems, especially in the context of a minority or an endangered language in contact with a majority language? What mechanisms enable the diffusion and grammaticalization of socially meaningful structures across languages? This theme revisits the notion of the Bharatiya linguistic area from a sociosyntactic perspective.