Ordinary English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia

ABSTRACT

This paper adopts a transglossic approach to explore the ordinariness of English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia. It thereby maintains that studying English as an ordinary part of these communities’ repertoires is contingent upon an approach to religion as situated, discursive, and interactive. This approach to religion is key to avoiding a paradoxical treatment of religion and language that critically examines the meaning of language without interrogating religion in the same manner. To this end, the paper uses examples from ethnographic face-to-face and online fieldwork amongst Muslim communities in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Bangladesh to explore and rethink the relationship between religion and language. The paper concludes that religion is co-constructed and emergent in, across, and through English and other languages and semiotic resources. English is rendered ordinary in the sense that it is employed and invoked to perform religious identity in interlocutors’ everyday language practices. It is thereby used to engage in processes of positioning, and emerges as a resource that is simultaneously translocal and polyvocal, while also locally meaningful in its situated practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• ordinariness
• English
• transglossic
• ethnography
• South and Central Asia

Acknowledgements

We would like to express utmost thanks to our interlocutors for all of their time and insights. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the special issue – Sender Dovchin and Jerry Won Lee – for their constructive feedback. For Brook: The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under REA grant agreement n° [609305]; and from the University of Zurich's“Forschungskredit”. For Shaila: The research presented here has been a part of her doctoral study funded by International Research Scholarship (IRS) and UTS President Scholarship from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). Shaila is also indebted to UTS for the positionof Associate, Adult Learning and Applied Linguistics Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), UTS which allows her access to resources for conducting research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The two case studies explored in this paper are taken from larger research projects, which encompass both online and offline data. For the purposes of this paper, however, we have chosen one vignette of face-to-face interactional data (Case study 1), and one of mediated interactional data (Case study 2). In both instances, the data provide insight into young Muslims’ engagement with language as a resource for religious identity construction.

2 The transcription of the data is broad, but includes indications of false starts and repetitions (marked using single or double hyphens), overlaps (marked using square brackets), and salient silences (relative to the speakers’ pace of speaking; marked using ellipses), as well as instances where the speaker laughs or his/her voice quality is suggestive of laughter (marked with an explicit comment in diamond brackets).