Language, voice and place among South Asian youth in Hong Kong

Abstract

Contemporary sociolinguistic developments have shown how the modern ethno-national ideological imaginations of 'language' are harder to maintain under current conditions of mobility and cultural/linguistic superdiversification. In contrast to the idea of language as a bounded system tied to a given territory, the last decades have seen the emergence of alternative vocabularies that allow us to better describe people's communicative practices vis-à-vis wider socio-economic processes involving unequal distribution of symbolic and material resources. By drawing on multi-sited and auto-ethnographic research carried out by a group of 10 youngsters with Nepali and Pakistani background in Hong Kong ...