Global diaspora bigger for Malayalam, Tamil

There are more people who speak Tamil or Malayalam as their mother tongue outside India than outside the states of Tamil Nadu or Kerala within India. Counterintuitive as it may sound, Punjabi and Gujarati migrants are still more likely to be found outside their states within India than abroad.

- Roshan Kishore and Abhishek Jha

To be sure, Punjabis are the most “dispersed” linguistic community in the country. These extremely interesting findings are from a paper published by Chinmay Tumbe from IIM Ahmedabad. The paper underlines the need for studying domestic and international migration patterns together and calls for rectifying the “flawed idea” of “constraining the concept of the diaspora to national borders”.