Talking Saivism in a Tamil migrant faith classroom

ABSTRACT

This study is located in a lesser-known educational context and investigates aspects of migration, religion and multilingualism. Focusing on the discourse of second-generation adolescent migrants in a Tamil Hindu temple school in urban Australia, I discuss how flexible language practices manifest in this migrant faith setting. I argue that the use of the heritage language is not always at the forefront, despite a monolingual Tamil language policy, because religious transmission is given priority over language transmission. At the same time, there are certain motivations that influence the use of Tamil: to index the close relationship between language and religious culture and to index one’s membership of the ethnoreligious community. This paper draws on ethnographic data to provide both a macro and micro view of these motivations – what drives adolescents to use their heritage language, how it is deployed from their linguistic repertoires, and how it contrasts with the use of the students’ dominant language, English. The analysis takes a whole of conversation approach to understanding the relationship between religion and heritage language use for second-generation migrant students.

KEYWORDS:

• religion
• Tamil
• Hindu temple
• translanguaging
• second-generation migrant
• Sri Lanka

Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes to the members of the Year 9 class and to the Director of Education at the Saiva Temple for their cooperation. I thank Dr Louisa Willoughby at Monash University for her valuable advice and the anonymous reviewer for such helpful feedback on improving this article. I wish to acknowledge the late Tope Omoniyi for inspiring research on language and religion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term ‘religious language’ can be a language that ‘is consistently used with religion’ or within a religious domain of language use (Samarin, 1987; as cited in Darquennes & Vandenbussche, 2011, p. 6), and also as the language that allows people to participate in religious custom.

2 I use ‘languaging’ to mean that ‘language users employ whatever linguistic features are at their disposal with the intention of achieving their communicative aims’ (Jørgensen, 2008, p. 169). In this paper the term is used interchangeably with ‘translanguaging’.

3 Migrants who came to Australia as young children or migrants’ children who are born in Australia.

4 Ethics approval was granted by Monash University.

5 In the Australian school system, Year 9 is the third year of high school and students are 14–15 years old.

6 This ‘burden of reconciliation’ for the Sri Lankan diaspora is discussed in an edited collection on research on Sri Lankan Tamils Australia (Kandasamy, Perera, & Ratnam, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this article was supported by a Postgraduate Publications Award from Monash University.

Notes on contributors

Nirukshi Perera

Nirukshi Perera was awarded a PhD in 2017 for her thesis on language practices in a Tamil Hindu temple. In 2018 she was the winner of the Australian Linguistic Society/Applied Linguistics Association of Australia Michael Clyne prize for Best Thesis on Immigrant Bilingualism and Language Contact and the joint winner of the Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics. She is interested in the connections between language, culture, religion and identity for Sri Lankan migrants, particularly for second-generation youth, investigated via ethnography and discourse analysis.