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Language shift and the family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora1
Abstract
Fishman's Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) emphasizes the family in maintaining the heritage languages of immigrant communities. This study uses interview data from Sri Lankan Tamil communities in the U.S.A., U.K., and Canada to explain how families account for the rapid loss of Tamil in the diaspora. It shows how the positive valuation of English since British colonization, the need to make up for past deprivations because of caste, religious, and gender inequality, the pressure for migrants to join the social mainstream, and the need to resolve intergenerational tensions influence the family to forego language maintenance goals. The findings encourage us to situate the family in macro‐social institutions, power, and history in order to understand the prospects for language maintenance. The article provides an inside view of the Sri Lankan Tamil migrant families to explain how they resolve the tensions of valuing cultural identity and yet disregarding heritage language proficiency.
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Citations
Cited by
Language policy, multilingual encounters, and transnational families
King, K. A. (2016) · Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development · doi:10.1080/01434632.2015.1127927 · Cited by 122
Sevinç, Y. (2016) · International Journal of the Sociology of Language · doi:10.1515/ijsl-2016-0034 · Cited by 40
Metadata
- Authors
- Canagarajah, A. S.
- Venue
- Journal of Sociolinguistics
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2008-04
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 143-176
- ISSN
- 1360-6441 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9841
- OpenAlex
- W2104806625
- Cited by
- 285
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 18.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Canagarajah, A. S. (2008). Language shift and the family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora1. Journal of Sociolinguistics. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2008.00361.x
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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