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Bengali, an official language of West Bengal and Tripura, has a significant presence in the north-eastern states of India. However, Bengali speakers constitute a linguistic minority in these states. To lay out a demographic context and language policy of the Union, English is recognized as the Associate Official language of India, and each state (29) recognizes its official language(s). This study focuses on the north-eastern state of Assam, a mini linguistic area and home to languages from several groups, including Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Karbi, Hajong, Dimasa, Nepali, etc. Situated at the periphery of the Indo-Aryan belt, the region represents a microcosm of linguistic diversity. While English (constituting ~8%), Assamese (constituting 48.4% of the population), and Bodo (constituting 4.51%) are the three official languages of the state, Meitei (0.54%) and Bengali (28.9%) are the two additional languages officially recognized in the Barak Valley and Hojai districts, respectively. This paper examines the dynamic multilingual ecology of the Bengali minority in Assam, examining how politically marginalized communities restructure their linguistic repertoires under the pressure of modern citizenship regimes (Baruah, 2020). Language shift, from “varieties” such as Sylheti, Comilla and Mymensinghia to Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB) and Assamese in this case, is not a simple linear loss, but a process beginning with strategic biopolitical negotiation leading to hybrid forms due to a shift in inter-generational transmission. These hybrid forms represent complex mosaic forms (Piplai, 2025), especially in the younger generations. Adopting sociolinguistic approaches (Simard et al., 2020), this study explores the psychosocial motivations which result in parents altering children's multilingual development by engineering the home-based transmission of native tongues. through. Following a Mixed-Methods Sociolinguistic Design, integrating Ethnographic Qualitative Research with Descriptive Linguistic Analysis, this study examines data collected from 74 participants across 3 generations in two zones: Brahmaputra and Barak Valley. Barak Valley's (constituting 78% of the total Bengali population) maintenance of Sylheti as a lingua franca has been seen as an active resistance against the “internal colonization” by both Assamese linguistic nationalism and Kolkata-centric SCB hegemony; the findings of this study reveal the presence of hybrid language forms which vary across generations in urban areas. Community learning of the native language in these cases reveals lexical, morpho-syntactic and phonological mixing of features from Sylheti, SCB, Hindi, English, etc. These hybrid mosaic forms represent a type of multilingualism that is not always additive in nature, but a defensive strategy in conflict zones that acts as a requirement for the minorities. This study, through the two contact zones, highlights the importance of population dynamics in the maintenance and intergenerational transmission of all languages independently in the multilingual ecosystem.
Keywords: Bengali, language shift, hybrid mosaic, intergenerational transmission, multilingualism.