Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 782

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

Expressing and negotiating identity in the London Indian Diaspora

Authors: Hundt, Marianne; Staicov, Adina
Submitted by: Hundt, Marianne (Universität Zürich, Switzerland)

For second-generation members of a diasporic community, ethnic and cultural affiliation are less straight-forward than for their parents’ generation. Furthermore, few studies so far have investigated morpho-syntactic variation among second-generation speakers in relation to their degree of integration into the heritage and host communities. None of the studies in the special issue on Second Generationers in English Today (26,3 2010), for instance, addresses the issue of morpho-syntactic variation.

We use data (questionnaires, topic-oriented interviews and a map task; see Zipp & Dellwo in preparation) to correlate identity construction in London’s Indian Diaspora on the one hand with the informants’ linguistic integration into the host community on the other hand. For our case study, we focus on the variable use of articles.

(1) a. the one next to the haystack (G02_M1)

b. next to ø haystack there’s another house (H01_M1)

(2) a. and then down to the village where no-one is younger than sixty-five
(G01_M1)

b. go right down to ø village where no-one is younger than sixty-five (H01_M2)

(3) a. keep on going left to the vast meadow (G01_M1)

b. go towards ø vast meadow (G01-M2)

This study is part of a larger project that investigates both socio-phonetic and morpho-syntactic variation and aims at combining a quantitative, variationist methodology with evidence from discursive identity construction: “The fact that it is relatively rare for discourse studies of identity to have an explicitly variationist focus points to a lacuna, with great potential for future research” (Mendoza-Denton, 2002: 490). We employ two standard sociolinguistic methodologies, namely (a) a questionnaire eliciting information on the subjects’ background (including degree of integration into the community and an ethnic identity index) and (b) sociolinguistic interviews with a focus on discursive identity construction, maintenance of transnational ties, meta-linguistic reflection on linguistic practices and attitudes towards varieties of English. Our data enable us to model the degree to which morpho-syntactic variation may or may not play a role in linguistic identity construction.

References

Hundt, Marianne. In preparation. Zero articles in Indian Englishes: a comparison of primary and secondary diaspora situations. To appear in Marianne Hundt and Devyani Sharma, eds. English in the Indian Diaspora. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2002. ‘Language and Identity.’ In Jack K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes. Eds. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden: Blackwell. pp. 475-499.

Zipp, Lena and Volker Dellwo. In preparation. ‘The sociophonetics of prosodic parameters and identity construction in the London Indian Diaspora.’ Paper submitted to be presented at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 19, Berlin 2012.