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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1268

Part of Session 158: Language biographies and migration experiences in urban contexts (Other abstracts in this session)

Tracing trajectories of agency: the language (hi)stories of transnational domestic workers

Authors: Lorente, Beatriz
Submitted by: Lorente, Beatriz (National University of Singapore, Singapore)

With contemporary migrations more likely to be transient and complex, there is a need to account for how transnational migrants make sense of the sociolinguistic disjunctures they may experience as they navigate multiple chains of movement and translocal interconnections between spaces. In this paper, I analyze the language (hi)stories of transnational Filipino domestic workers (FDWs). In particular, I trace how transnational FDWs construct their agency in their encounters with different languages, registers and orders of indexicality in: (1) towns and cities in the Philippines before they migrated, (2) Singapore where they work for various households (e.g. Singaporeans, expatriates, etc.), (3) their hometowns or cities in the Philippines where they temporarily return for vacations in between their work contracts, and (4) the various cities they migrated to as housekeepers,  domestic workers, au pairs, etc. after their stint in Singapore, i.e. Copenhagen, Dubai and London. These stories were initially collected during in-depth interviews conducted with 19 Filipino domestic workers in Singapore. The narratives of three of these Filipino domestic workers were later updated and expanded to include their stories after they left Singapore to work in Copenhagen, Dubai and London.  In analyzing the stories of these transnational FDWs, I discuss how they focus on the disjunctures they experience as their movements across spaces - spatial and temporal, vertical and horizontal - change the value of their linguistic resources, in particular of their English.  I examine how the women use their own notions of sociolinguistic ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptability’ to characterize and evaluate the sociolinguistic repertoires they have developed and how such notions are central to their sense of individual agency. Finally, I explore the alignments between these individual stories of sociolinguistic ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptability’ and national narratives of the ideal domestic worker and ideal overseas Filipino worker, and what the implications of such alignments may be.