‘My language, my identity’: negotiating language use and attitudes in the New Zealand Fiji Indian diaspora

Abstract

One result of colonial and post-colonial migration is the development of large diaspora communities. The Indian diaspora is currently one of the largest world-wide. Over 20 million people of Indian descent live outside of India, many of them in an English-speaking country. Maintenance of the heritage language and use of the majority language are important aspects of identity construction among members of such diaspora communities. Matters become more complex for twice-migrants, i.e. in situations where movement to a secondary diaspora has become necessary. This paper takes up these issues in a case study on the Fiji Indian diaspora in Wellington, New Zealand. Based on data from sociolinguistic interviews, it looks at discursive identity construction around the notion of language use and attitudes towards different languages and their varieties. An important aspect turns out to be the positioning of Fiji Indians not only vis-à-vis speakers of the host community but also relative to Indian migrants who have come to New Zealand directly from the Indian subcontinent.

Keywords:

• Indian diaspora
• twice-migrants
• identity construction
• language use
• attitudes

Acknowledgements

This paper would not have been possible without the help and support of various people. First and foremost, Sunita Narayan, who introduced me to her network, and all the members of the Fiji Indian Community in Wellington who made time for an interview in their busy every-day lives. In the years following fieldwork, (student) research assistants all worked on the transcription of the interview data: thanks (in chronological order) go to Katja Christine Meyer, Katrin Forrer, Anja Neukom-Hermann, Simone Pfenninger, Manuela Neurauter, Brook Bolander and André Huber. Adina Staicov commented on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. The importance of the homeland for diaspora communities had already been observed by Falzon (2003, p. 664): ‘… the homeland will continue to exert its influence on the social relations of a people in diaspora, either because they “transport” aspects of the homeland to their diasporic destination/s or because they continue to cultivate ties with it, or both’.

2. For Vertovec (2005, p. 3), diaspora communities are not necessarily characterized by the maintenance of transnational links.

3. Note that there is variation in the labels that are used to refer to people of Indian origin in the Fiji Islands. The two most common are Fiji Indian (which stresses the Indian element) or Indo-Fijian (which makes a more explicit claim on a relation to the Fiji Islands as a home/homeland).

4. This section partly relies on the report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, chapter 22. (retrieved November 27, 2017, from http://indiandiasporanicin/diasporapdf/chapter22pdf).

5. According to the most recent statistics, the current situation is not much different: the majority of Indians are Hindus (76.7%). In addition, there are also some Sikh (0.9%), a sizeable number of Muslims (15.9%) and, due to missionary efforts, converted Christians of various denominations (5.8%). The remainder belong to other religious groups or reported not to be religious (retrieved November 28, 2017, from http://www.statsfiji.gov.fj/statistics/social-statistics/religion).

6. In 2007, the Governor General of New Zealand (Anand Satyanand) was of Fiji Indian origin. I had contacted him via letter prior to my arrival in New Zealand and was invited for an interview at government house.

7. Bourdieu (1992) distinguishes different types of capital: economic (material wealth), cultural (knowledge, skills, education, etc.), symbolic (prestige, honour) and linguistic (capacity to use a language).

8. Note that Hindi School in Wellington was started in 1992 by a group of Fiji Indians, but that in 2007 there were also a few children whose parents came from other places, such as South Africa. (retrieved November 28, 2017, from http://wellingtonhindischool.blogspot.com).

9. Pakeha is the Maori word first used in reference to white colonizers, nowadays used more widely for Caucasians living in New Zealand.

10. Zero past-tense marking is a feature typical of FE (see, e.g., Biewer, 2015).

11. Note that this adaptability refers more to speakers’ accents than to more subtle aspects of grammatical usage (see Hundt, 2014b, for further discussion of the relation between maintenance of transnational ties and substrate influence for second-generation Fiji Indians in Wellington).

12. For background on this interdisciplinary e-seminar, see Fischer-Hornung, Brosius, Hundt, and Mesthrie (2009).

13. The friendliness dimension is also evident in excerpt (4), where the informant maintains that use of English rather than FH would be considered ‘not friendly’.

14. Interestingly, one informant attributed the origins of this ‘broken’ variety of Hindi to inter-ethnic communication with Fijians: ‘yeah/ cos the Fijians were very good at picking up Indian language/ and that's how the language got broken down, into such a um slang, term as Indians from India would call it/ very slang term/ because the Indians took it over// it was the Fijians who started breaking it down so they could understand what was being said/ and so passed back and forth, everything got shortened/ yeah/ to create a new language [laughs]’ (NK, first-generation female, in her 20s).

15. Excerpt (29) has a zero article (see, e.g., Hundt, 2014b), excerpt (34) contains an instance of an unmarked past tense come and say (see Biewer, 2015), and excerpt (30) ends in a vernacular question tag which has been described as a calque from FH (see Mugler & Tent, 2008).

16. Interestingly, the view that people in Fiji speak British English rather than FE (because that is the model that is provided from primary school onwards) is also found with the Indo-Fijians in Fiji, as the following comment from an attitude survey (Hundt et al., 2015, p. 702) shows: ‘while speaking we use Fiji English i.e. British English because we learnt these English since our primary school’ (Indo-Fijian, female, age 16–19).

17. Note that brother is meant in the religious sense here.

18. One teenage second-generation informant was also of the opinion that Fiji Indians spoke English more formally than members of the host community (even though his choice of words betrays the statement at the same time): ‘we kind of speak it a little more formally// like/ although you find it more comfortable speaking with it/ um, you're not fully comfortable with it// like it's not your own language and stuff’ (NL, second-generation male, in his 10s).

19. Other first-generation informants are somewhat less self-confident about their accents, as the following comment shows: ‘I- I still struggle with that I still hold my uhm sort of strong Fiji Indian accent to it’ (JP, first-generation male, in his 50s).