Get to Know Your Asian Indian Caucus

A monolingual speech-language pathologist recently reached out to ASHA’s Asian Indian Caucus (AIC) for a Tamil-speaking SLP to provide services for a 70-year-old elderly New Jersey man. The patient had expressive aphasia due to a recent stroke. The AIC community—through its active listserve—immediately located a bilingual SLP who spoke English and Tamil. The SLP worked with the client’s local SLP to help him receive linguistically and culturally appropriate services. In another instance, a 35-year-old female vocalist— referred to the AIC by a laryngologist in California—was seeking consultation from an SLP with knowledge of Indian Hindustani classical vocal music. Once again, our network of members quickly found a SLP specializing in this highly specialized area and helped initiate services via telepractice. These two scenarios provide a glimpse into the variety of ways AIC serves clients of Asian Indian origin with communication disorders. Who are Asian Indians? Asian Indians, commonly referred to as South Asians, trace their origins to the Indian subcontinent, including—but not limited to—Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore and Sri Lanka. They represent the second largest immigrant community in the United States, according to the 2010 Census. They also represent a group with significant diversity in their language, religion and culture. In fact, they speak more than 20 languages, such as Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali, ...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Advocacy Audiology Slider Speech-Language Pathology ASHA Convention Cultural Diversity Professional Development Source Type: blogs