Rewriting the Past and Reimagining the Future: The Social Life of a Tamil Heritage Language Industry

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Rewriting the Past and Reimagining the Future: The Social Life of a Tamil Heritage Language Industry
Abstract
The author points out that globally circulating discourses associated with heritage language industries often promote temporally dichotomous views of spoken and written languages that deny coeval status to linguistic minorities. She argues that in the multilingual city of Montreal, where Sri Lankan refugees work to preserve a classicalist style of written Tamil and Indian immigrants work to revitalize a modernist style of spoken Tamil, this division of labor is undermined by elders and youth who, in mixing colloquial and literary styles of Tamil, French, and English, reframe curricular and nationalist discourses of language loss and degeneration into more empowering narratives of developmental progress and ethnolinguistic identification.
Publication
American Ethnologist
Volume
Vol. 38
Issue
no. 4
Pages
774-789
Date
November 2011
Language
en
Citation
Das, Sonia Neela. “Rewriting the Past and Reimagining the Future: The Social Life of a Tamil Heritage Language Industry.” American Ethnologist Vol. 38, no. 4 (November 2011): 774–789.
Find in a library
Permalink