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Sri Lankan Tamil experiences of the home-land and host-land: The interaction between language and diasporic identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2020

Lavanya Sankaran Open the ORCID record for Lavanya Sankaran [Opens in a new window]
Lavanya Sankaran*
Affiliation:
King's College London, UK
*
Address for correspondence: Lavanya Sankaran, King's College London, Education, Communication and Society, Waterloo Bridge Wing Franklin-Wilkins Building Waterloo Road, LondonSE1 9NH, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

This article takes an empirical approach to investigate how diasporic identification with the home-land and host-land interacts with language in a mutually influencing dynamic interplay, giving rise to new language ideologies and identities. Since scholars are increasingly of the opinion that the processes of dislocation and resettlement create multi-layered connections with the home-land and host-land (David 2012:377), it is crucial we recognise that the relationship between fixed geographical territories and communities, and the cultural-linguistic practices associated with them, need to be denaturalised (Rosa & Trivedi 2017:331). In doing so, it is possible to retheorise diasporic identity as a sociocultural process. Attention to language can help shift diasporic phenomena away from being defined as ‘bounded, territorialised, static and homogeneous’ (Canagarajah & Silberstein 2012:82). Examining Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic experiences of the home-land and host-land and their relationship with language will promote such an agenda. (Diaspora, space, home-land, host-land)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 143 - 166
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

This article is the product of research funded by the Leverhulme Trust for the project entitled ‘Adult language socialization in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in London’ (September 2015–2018). I would like to thank Professor Ben Rampton (principal investigator), Dr. Melanie Cooke (co-researcher), and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this article.

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