'I have to learn my own language, that’s the problem': language, voice and mobility in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper draws on a 3-years multi-sited ethnographic research focusing on a group of youngsters with South Asian backgrounds living in Hong Kong. As Hong Kong changed from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, in 1997, tensions have emerged over what languages should be learned by whom, when and to what degree. Such tensions cannot be detached from shifting conditions as to who gets to decide what language repertoires are attributed value in which sociolinguistic markets (Bourdieu, 1991) vis-à-vis new patterns of mobility intensifying linguistic and cultural (super)diversification (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011). In the case of youth with South Asian backgrounds, these have been repeatedly reported as facing significant school failure and lack of access to higher education, which has been constructed by the Hong Kong government as the consequence of insufficient proficiency in Cantonese. Apart from the challenges to access Cantonese, many of them also struggle to be institutionally considered legitimate speakers of English in the Hong Kong educational system. Data analysis will closely examine the case of one of these youngsters who navigated this discursive space by capitalizing on the enactment of chronotopic laminations of identity (Bakhtin 1981) in which her language repertoire and community-alignment is re-evaluated. While allowing her to project valued voice for socio-institutional boundary-crossing, such a symbolic displacement also contradicts some of the hegemonic meanings associated with the modern ideological constructs of the ‘native language/speaker’ and ‘first/second language’.