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Article published In:
Language and Communication of Asian Diaspora Communities in Europe
Edited by Zi Wang and Florian Coulmas
[Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 31:2] 2021
► pp. 213–235

Hidden language ‘battles’ in the diaspora

Linguistic identities and ideologies towards home and host languages among Pakistanis in Barcelona

ORCID logo | Universitat de Lleida

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’.

Keywords: Language ideology, linguistic identity, language maintenance, transnational migration, Pakistani diaspora, Catalonia
Article outline
  • 1.South-Asian migrants in Europe: The case of Pakistanis in Catalonia
    • 1.1Legality and employment context
    • 1.2Sociolinguistic context
  • 2.The research project
    • 2.1Aims of the study
    • 2.2Theoretical considerations
    • 2.3Methods, data and participants
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Host languages: Delanguaging the Pakistani diaspora
    • 3.2Home languages: ‘English es number one en el mundo’
    • 3.3Home languages: ‘Hope is in Urdu’
    • 3.4Home languages: ‘Punjabi es como catalán’
  • 4.Findings
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00065.dal
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