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19 - Diasporas: An Overview

from Part Five - Language Diasporas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Dirk Hoerder  and
Henry Yu
Edited by
Salikoko S. Mufwene  and
Anna María Escobar
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Anna María Escobar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

Diaspora formation, like that of ethnic enclaves, is a process to be analyzed according to gender, generation, and social status given different spheres of communication and thus different linguistic registers. Children of migrants, in particular when attending school in the receiving society, form again different registers and, more than their parents, communicate with peers of the new majority language or of several languages. Linguistic métissage (“hybridization”) is a generational phenomenon. A functional analysis of “ethnic” elites indicates that clerics, journalists, and writers, in contrast to managers and mediators with the outside world, advocated language retention, since liturgies, literary writings, and culture-of-origin news may not easily be transposed into another language. Common people, on the other hand, in order to cope with challenges of their daily diasporic lives, needed quick rudimentary competence in the receiving country’s language. Language hybridization, in contrast to an established koine, involves a language of parental origin and a language of peer group and school socialization out of the context of parental cultural background and out of intense integration into the receiving society. Thus, diasporic language formation occurs in a process of merging and recontextualizing.

Keywords

diasporalinguistic métissagehybridizationlanguage of origingender and generational aspects of language changelanguage retentionlinguistic recontextualizing
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
Volume 1: Population Movement and Language Change
 , pp. 613 - 640
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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