ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of three important linguistic features of interaction in postcolonial societies: multilingualism, code-switching, and language identities. It describes the central roles played by sociocultural expectations, identity projections, and relations between language, society, and identity in postcolonial interaction. Postcolonial pragmatics uses discourse as a key to exploring complex forms of identity construction, role projection, group maintenance, gate-keeping, and social empowerment and marginalisation in postcolonial societies. Postcolonial pragmatics provides a framework for investigating these strategies and gaining linguistic insight into the impact of ethnic, cultural, and lingual diversity on postcolonial interaction. It addresses all manifestations of postcolonial discourse, including face-to-face conversation, print journalism, public broadcasting, audiovisual media, and Internet discourse. The linguistic negotiation of identities and alignments is a key issue in postcolonial life, where decades of migration have created large populations of individuals who, to different extents, have become uprooted from their homelands, native traditions, and ethnic, tribal, and family identities.
