TY - JOUR
T1 - Rewriting the past and reimagining the future
T2 - The social life of a Tamil heritage language industry
AU - Neela Das, Sonia
PY - 2011/11
Y1 - 2011/11
N2 - 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. In the multilingual city of Montreal, Quebec, 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.
AB - 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. In the multilingual city of Montreal, Quebec, 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.
KW - Globalization
KW - Heritage language industry
KW - Montreal
KW - Tamil diaspora
KW - Temporality
KW - Urban multilingualism
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=81155133429&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=81155133429&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01336.x
DO - 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01336.x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:81155133429
SN - 0094-0496
VL - 38
SP - 774
EP - 789
JO - American Ethnologist
JF - American Ethnologist
IS - 4
ER -