Language, policy and place: community discourse of South Asian Youth

Abstract

This paper draws on a multi-sited ethnographic research focusing on the sociolinguistic practices of a group of ethnic minority youngsters living in Hong Kong. Under economic, linguistic, cultural, and institutional conditions of late modernity (Appadurai, 1996), the increasing mobility of people makes the ethno-national imagination of homogeneous linguistic communities hard to maintain (Blommaert, 2013). In contrast to the modern ideological imagination of the “legitimate members” of linguistic communities (i.e. native speakers), people’s mobilization of their linguistic resources in contexts traversed by superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007) show how marginal practices linked to the idea of language as a bounded system tied to a given territory are. The same goes for the discursive construction of bilingualism as a conflation of two separate monolingualisms (Heller, 2007). Instead, crossing practices in which languages, repertoires and styles are mobilized in unexpected and unbounded ways occupy a central position (Rampton, 1995). This new scenario makes language standardization more difficult to be enforced, and so the management of multilingualism has entered the political agenda even in countries that have traditionally ignored the realities of minority groups and linguistic diversity (Codó & Pérez-Milans, 2014). In the case of Hong Kong, where youngsters with Nepali and Pakistani background suffer marked socio-economic marginalization, controversies have arose regarding new language education policies issued by the government which constructs insufficient knowledge of Cantonese as the main cause. Following previous previous work at an educational institution (Pérez-Milans & Soto, 2014), this paper reports on new 3-months ethnographic fieldwork exploring 10 youngsters’ (face-to-face and digital) discursive practices outside the school, with the overarching aim of understanding how they navigate and transform these changing ideological and sociolinguistic constructions. Data analysis will focus on how they challenge traditional notions of “first” and “second” language, as well as of place, with implications for policy making and sociolinguistic theory. Keywords (up to 3): youth; multilingualism; superdiversity.