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ABSTRACT
This narrative case study examines the multilingual practice and identity of Haben, a refugee-background Somali-Bantu in a larger one-year (2019-2020) ethnography with refugee arrivals in coping with new linguistic and cultural environment in a northeastern U.S. city. Framed by the entangled transnational-translocal approach to multilinguals, languages, and identities, this study finds Haben’s African languages and English were acquired and used as resources for survival and thrival and weaponized against bullying and discrimination in his early and later life in diaspora. Haben’s multilingual identity was (re)produced by the sociocultural and linguistic flows across national boundaries and his responses to local needs. This study indicates multilingual identity as a discursive spatio-temporal entanglement that blurs the boundaries between transnational-translocal, past-present, human-nonhuman. This study challenges deficit discourse that perceives immigrant multilingualism as a deficit.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The terminology “Black” is used in accordance with the American Community Survey.
The terms “Black” is an umbrella identifier which refers to anyone born of African descent. “African American,” meanwhile, refers specifically to those Black individuals born in the U.S. or of American descent in this paper.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey. (2016). Nativity by Language Spoken at Home by Ability to Speak English for the Population Five Years and Over.
2 a speech sound made by sucking air quickly into the mouth, but nor into the lungs, using the tongue or lips (Cambridge Dictionary).