Volume 2013, Issue 222 - Migration, Language Maintenance and Shift

Global migratory patterns bring about significant changes in the linguistic and cultural ecologies at the local level in both the North and the South. These changes have coincided, for example, with attempts to fashion a European Union via complex legal and administrative instruments in the North. However, political change and conflict result in dislocation and mobility at individual and large-scale community levels. These become apparent through tension exhibited in social networks and structures which are at once centripetal and centrifugal (e.g. Lo Bianco 2010). Change is thus a function of ever evolving diversity as well as of new configurations of structures of restraint (e.g. Foucault 1977; Bourdieu 1991). Debates within Europe, including “super-diversity” (Vertovec 2007), may offer a lens on discourses accompanying change in Australia, located in the geographic South, but with ambivalent aspirations towards the North. Migration from Africa, the Middle East/Afghanistan and Asia brings tangible, unequal movements in the local ecological landscape. As elsewhere, increasing diversification expels urbanized anxiety while civil and public layered responses exert pressure towards both divergence and convergence. Changing identities and “linguistic citizenship” (Stroud 2001) emerge in local narratives of attempts to widen or close spatial divides, and in seams of language shift, maintenance and sustainability.

Studies into language and migrations have traditionally focused on transnational migrations, with a view to determining what Borland (2006) has termed facilitating and motivating factors for language maintenance or shift in the destination country. Facilitating factors are aspects of the socio-political context that allow for language maintenance, among them, supportive government policies and frequent contacts with the migrants' homeland. Motivating factors refer to a conscious individual decision and commitment to maintain and transmit the home language to the next generation. Indeed, language and migration studies have shed considerable light on language use and shift in transnational immigrant communities; however, they have hardly paid attention to language use in rural-urban migration contexts, let alone explore the similarities and differences between language maintenance or shift in rural-urban and south-north migrations to determine why language shift seems to be the norm in the latter context but not in the former. This article explores this issue as well as language shift and maintenance in African immigrant communities in the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area, with a focus on language use narratives by two families. It argues that the absence of facilitating and motivating factors in south-north migrations, coupled with utility-maximization (i.e., greatest benefit of language shift) (Tuominen 1999) and colingualism (Schell 2008) – the tendency by bilinguals to communicate in a shared L2 even if they share a common L1 – accelerates language shift rather than maintenance in transnational migrations. Conversely, the presence of facilitating factors, especially frequent contacts with the rural communities, together with lower educational levels, reduces the possibility for language shift in rural-urban migrations.

This article looks at a particular type of migration, that is, the often cyclical and pendulum-like movements from the villages of the Eastern Cape to Cape Town (South Africa). The ethnographic analysis focuses on the semiotic practices migrants engage in as they make the city their home, and develop urban styles of speaking and being (i.e. fashion themselves as urban personae). Drawing on Bank (2011) and Dick (2010, 2011), these two processes are referred to as place-making and people-making . Two urban ways of speaking are discussed in some detail: the emblematic use of English material in an isiXhosa frame (indexing aspiration and mobility), and the symbolic meanings of Tsotsitaal as a quintessentially urban speech style which indexes social as well local (neighborhood) identity. However, as speakers navigate the complex, shifting and often stylized variety space of the city they draw not only on speech forms which are indexical of urbanity, but also on “deep” isiXhosa, that is, a style of speaking which evokes the normativities of traditional, rural authenticity.

This article reports on a narrative study which explored the language maintenance and the related identity experiences of an Afrikaans-speaking migrant from South Africa who has lived in New Zealand since 2001. The article tells his Afrikaans maintenance story, focusing particularly on identity and language use, as constructed during a series of three narrative interviews conducted over a period of six years. It is informed by recent discussions of social inclusion in the field of migration and sociolinguistics. A thematic analysis of big story data and a positioning analysis of a small story show that the migrant was successful at maintaining Afrikaans and achieving social inclusion within his social networks. However, based on the analyses, the article also suggests that the ways social inclusion interacts with language maintenance and the construction of self are dynamic and complex in migrant contexts.

Based on a seventeen-month ethnography in a Baptist Chinese church in Western Canada, this article examines how the establishment of an English congregation for youth in response to language shift in fact facilitated minority language maintenance. Drawing on two ideologies of bi-/multilingualism, I illustrate that, even though perceived as “the second generation who don't understand Chinese”, young members were multilinguals with varying degrees of dominance and fluency in Chinese. I further argue that the English Congregation constituted an important space for the socialization of youth with peers and/or adults where Chinese could be used and thus learned, although engagement with the language might differ between individuals and indeed across various stages of their lives. Implications for language maintenance research are discussed.

In recent years, Sri Lankan Tamils have fled their homeland as refugees as a result of the ethnic conflict in the country. Despite their heightened linguistic consciousness, community elders claim that Tamil youth are turning their backs on their heritage language. My data from Lancaster (California, US), East London (UK) and Toronto (Canada) shows a more complex attitude towards language maintenance by Tamil youth. Though a majority of the youth declared that English was their dominant language of proficiency, they insisted that it did not affect their positive orientation to ethnic identity and community affiliation. They adopted diverse language practices to enjoy in-group identity: namely, code switching into Tamil; emblematic uses of Tamil; switches into Tamilized versions of English; receptive competence in Tamil which enabled them to respond in English; and ritualized practices of communication where they could participate in communicative events with the aid of multimodal resources. These practices suggest that migrant Tamils are treating languages as fluid resources for identity and community construction. The hybrid and multilingual construction of heritage language and identity enables Tamils to shuttle between different languages and communities in migrant settings to resolve the dilemmas of mobility and identity.

Singapore's status as one of the most globalized nations in the world rests primarily on its reliance on cheap immigrant labor. However, with foreign workers now comprising 36 percent of Singapore's population, resentment is fast building up among local Singaoreans, as evidenced in the public discourses on migrants which contruct largely negative identities for them. In the context of Singapore's language policy, where English is deemed necessary not only as an interethnic lingua franca but for global economic competitiveness, anti-immigrant discourse frequently comes to be couched in terms of language politics and language ideologies that strongly smack of monolingual/monolithic attitudes in relation to English. Thus, paradoxically, despite a large proportion of Singapore's current population being the descendants of early immigrants, the “foreign workers” hired today for jobs Singaporeans themselves are unwilling to take up, are castigated for their English language skills, among other things. Because numerous studies dealing with the implications for language shift and maintenance in relation to Singapore's language planning initiatives already exist, our article refocuses issues to allow grassroots subjectivity to come in by examining how immigrant identities in Singapore are negotiated through the personal narratives of the everyday experience of these foreign workers, framed within the contraints of language politics and language ideological understandings prevalent in Singapore.

Tariana is an endangered language spoken by about 100 people in a remote area of northwest Amazonia, Brazil. The language is spoken in a fascinating area where one can only marry someone who speaks a different language and who belongs to a different ethnic group. Tariana is being rapidly displaced by an unrelated language, Tucano. The article focuses on the drastic changes which have occurred among the Tariana over the past decade. At present, Tariana speaking communities as such no longer exist. The linguistic exogamy is occasionally violated. Language remains the badge of identity, but for most people only in theory. The puristic language attitudes have relented. Occasional code-switching with Tucano and Portuguese (the national language) is no longer considered a mark of incompetence. Many Tariana lament that their language is being lost, and are relying on the school to “learn it back”, and the language is no longer spoken in the families.