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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1396

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Positioning as Transmigrants: Language and Identity among Indian Tamil youths in Hong Kong

Authors: Lui, Hong Yee Kelvin
Submitted by: Lui, Hong Yee Kelvin (King's College London, United Kingdom)

In this sociolinguistic multiple-case study of three Tamil adolescents in Hong Kong, I employed in-depth interviews in soliciting their perspectives on their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identifications that are entranched in networks of relationships across localities. Using the positioning theory as a method of discourse analysis, I describe the multiple ways through which the young Tamils positioned themselves with certain national/ cultural identity labels, who they positioned as their Other, and how they resisted being positioned. Methodologically, drawing on the recent call among qualitative researchers for treating the interview as a social practice (e.g. Talmy, 2011), I critically analyze and at times problematize the interview data, avoiding focusing only on the content of the words produced by the participants. 

By giving voices to the multilingual individuals, a greater focus on the participants’ individual agency in the analysis was enabled. Although the Tamil youths were at times presenting themselves as unenthusiastic participants in their transnational spaces that they often characterized as the “old” and the “traditional,” they nevertheless showed no overt signs of complete disavowal of their connection with their heritage and the Tamil language. Instead, they are active participants in, and co-constructors of, a form of Indian or Tamil identity with varying degrees of transnational and, to a lesser degree, local inflections. These were shown to be accomplished through, for instance, adopting a subject position as an English-dominant muiltilingual, claiming “affiliation” (Leung, Harris, & Rampton, 1997) with the language associated with the majority of the host society, and appropriating the language practices traditionally linked with their parental cultural and religious practices.

These findings could hardly be generalized to all the second generation young Tamils in Hong Kong, but could provide insights into the hows, or in other words, the fine-grained process of these young Tamils’ self-positioning involved in identity negotiation.

References: 

C., Harris, R., & Rampton, B. (1997). The idealised native speaker, reified ethnicities and classroom realities. TESOL Quarterly, 31(3), 543-560.

S. (2011). The interview as collaborative achievement: Interaction, identity, and ideology in a speech event. Applied Linguistics, 32(1), 25-42.