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hierarchies in which rigid phenotypical and/or religious classifications play a role, tend to translate into categorical linguistic distinctions. Sociolinguistic manifestations of hard boundaries include the maintenance of heritage languages, or the preservation (or even creation) of distinctive linguistic features. Conversely, “soft” ethnic boundaries are found in societal contexts where assimilation into a perceived dominant ethnic group, or integration, whereby individuals are afforded scope for deploying distinct ethnicities, are plausible options (Giles 1979; Giles, Bourhis & Taylor 1977; see further Berry 1997). Their sociolinguistic manifestations include multilingual repertoires, which translate into widespread code-switching (Auer 1999). Whether hard or soft ethnic boundaries prevail seems to depend on a variety of factors, which may comprise economic and political competition, religion, and race. Sociolinguistic literature suggests that linguistic interaction between ethnolinguistic groups is likely to be effected via the language of one of the several ethnolinguistic groups in contact if that group is perceived as dominant and inclined to assimilate others, a scenario typical of immigration contexts where immigrant ethnicities tend to dissolve into local “mainstreams.” By contrast, sociolinguistic literature suggests that lingua francas are a defining feature of multiethnic states, especially postcolonial ones where incipient nation-building is still at pains to offer viable alternatives to ethnicity for identity construction.

Nation-building in postcolonial contexts has often been consonant with strategies of promoting ethnically neutral senses of nationhood whose goal is to minimize risks of conflict. Retaining the former colonizer’s language as an official language was compatible with these strategies on account of the fact that the European elites that spoke it natively in the colonial context in many cases suddenly lost their social preponderance and visibility in the wake of national independences. When present, indigenous lingua francas whose native speakers form a demographic minority have also often been promoted as L-function official languages. H-function and L-function lingua francas in the postcolonial world generally cohabit with heritage languages as part of multilingual repertoires to degrees that vary with social class. Whether membership of a higher social class “erases” ethnicity has perhaps most notably been debated in urban studies that take as a point of departure the dichotomy formulated by Nathan Glazer between a “dual city” (where ethnic boundaries are superseded by class boundaries) and a “divided city” (where the opposite scenario exists) (Glazer 1994; see further Bekker & Leildé 2006). If ethnic boundaries are “softened” by class boundaries, one may expect lingua francas to retain an ethnically neutral character by being appropriated by an ethnically neutral middle class, which may ultimately nativize them. If ethnicity remains prominent, one may expect heritage languages to generally remain part of native