Identity in the London Indian diaspora: Towards the quantification of qualitative data

For second‐generation members of a diaspora community, ethnic and cultural affiliation are less straightforward than for the first generation. We compare information on identity construction in London's Indian Diaspora with the participants’ linguistic integration into the host community. Our s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inWorld Englishes Vol. 37; no. 2; pp. 166 - 184
Main Authors Hundt, Marianne, Staicov, Adina
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2018
Subjects
Colloquial language
Cultural identity
Diaspora
Ethnic identity
Ethnicity
Language usage
Linguistic identity
Qualitative research
Sociolinguistics
United Kingdom > UK
England
London England
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Summary:For second‐generation members of a diaspora community, ethnic and cultural affiliation are less straightforward than for the first generation. We compare information on identity construction in London's Indian Diaspora with the participants’ linguistic integration into the host community. Our study is novel and exploratory in that it combines quantitative, variationist methodology with a qualitative approach. We employ two standard sociolinguistic instruments to model subjects’ ethnic identity: a questionnaire and sociolinguistic interviews with a focus on discursive identity construction. In a second step we investigate possible connections between morphosyntactic variation and ethnic identity in language use data from three different communicative contexts. The results show that, while interview data on ethnic identity are amenable to quantification, clear correlations between the resulting identity scores and vernacular morphosyntactic features are difficult to find. In particular, patterns of style‐shifting between the different communicative contexts are not as expected.
ISSN:0883-2919
1467-971X
DOI:10.1111/weng.12311