Hidden language 'battles' in the diaspora: Linguistic identities and ideologies towards home and host languages among Pakistanis in Barcelona

Following a critical sociolinguistics approach to language maintenance in the diaspora, this paper investigates interplaying linguistic identities and ideologies towards home and host languages among four case-study Pakistanis living in Catalonia, a Catalan/Spanish-speaking European society. By draw...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Sabaté Dalmau, Maria
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10459.1/70165
Acceso en línea:https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00065.dal
http://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/70165
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Language ideology
Linguistic identity
Language maintenance
Transnational migration
Pakistani diaspora
Catalonia
Descripción
Sumario:Following a critical sociolinguistics approach to language maintenance in the diaspora, this paper investigates interplaying linguistic identities and ideologies towards home and host languages among four case-study Pakistanis living in Catalonia, a Catalan/Spanish-speaking European society. By drawing on fieldnotes, interviews, naturally-occurring conversations and visual materials gathered in a Barcelona call shop, it shows how informants invest in Spanish as the 'integration' language, despite being categorised as 'deficient' users of it. They present themselves as 'native' speakers of Urdu, which indexes modern 'Muslimness' and 'Pakistaniness', while Punjabi users, associated with the 'yokels', are silenced. English is ambivalently taken-up as an intra-group sign of educational status and political power and as an anti-Muslim 'coloniser' language. Overall, these stratifying sociolinguistic behaviours reveal how Pakistanis' home/host multilingual resources get re-ideologised through linguistic hierarchisations which foster the maintenance of majority languages only, dismissing minority language speakers, in unchartered transnational contexts where these are already 'delanguaged'.