Lecture
“If Naveeni akka can do it, you can do it too!”: Changing pragmatic conventions in the English-speaking Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora community
- Date
- Tuesday 8 October 2024
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
Anke Lensch currently holds a lecturer position at the University of Bonn (Germany). She will be visiting Leiden University with the ERASMUS+ scholar programme to learn more about the linguistics department and she is very much looking forward to discussing her current research projects with scholars from Leiden.
Abstract
This project examines the impact of migration, globalization and digitalization on pragmatic conventions in a multicultural English-speaking community by zooming in on the globally dispersed Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora community. The outbreak of the Sri Lankan civil war in the 1980s led many families to leave Sri Lanka to find refuge abroad. In the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, language shift to the dominant language of the country of residence is often rapid (cf. Canagarajah 2008: 154; Somalingam 2017: 206). This project uses a mixed methods approach including interviews, questionnaires and corpus analyses to determine when and how Sri Lankan Tamil politeness conventions nevertheless keep surfacing in English interactions of diaspora community members residing in different nations across the globe.
Canagarajah, Suresh. 2008. “Language shift and the family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/2. 143–176.
Somalingam, Tusintha. 2017. Doing Diaspora. Ethnonationale Homogenisierung im transnationalen Bildungsraum der Tamil Diaspora. Wiesbaden, Springer.
Keywords
Code-mixing, heritage language, migration, multilingualism