CSAS Lecture Series | Deconstructing Language Boundaries and Transnational Identities: Malayalees in Kerala and the US

Mesthrie (2008) describes the "third focus" of South Asian diaspora as being economically motivated, which, in the context of the South Asian diaspora in the United States, describes the wave of South Asian immigration following the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. Here, I explore the impact of immigrants who moved to the United States after the late 1990s, concurrent with and following the IT boom, on the language practices and ideologies of the three generations of existing diasporic community. I focus in particular on the Malayalee community in Minnesota, an area which did not have a significant concentration of Malayalee- (or South Asian-) origin residents prior to the 1990s (cf., Sridhar & Sridhar 2000). Bringing together data from 45 oral histories of Minnesotan Malayalees, experimental work conducted in Kerala, and a large scale survey (in collaboration with Dr. Maya Abtahian) investigating language use and linguistic ideologies of Malayalees in North America, I interpret the language maintenance practices and ideologies of Malayalees in Minnesota in the context of Malayalees' language practices in Kerala and beyond.

Taken together, this work (A) proposes a distinct "fourth focus" of South Asian diaspora by outlining qualitative differences in linguistic context and practices between the pre- and post-1990s immigrants, (B) problematizes the dichotomy between diaspora and in situ, which are the predominant analytic categories used in this type of linguistic research, and (C) argues that the inclusion of English-origin elements in North American Malayalam does not necessarily indicate language shift, but rather can be reflective of language maintenance.

Savithry Namboodiripad earned her BA and MA in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego. She has been an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor since 2019, following a two year Collegiate Fellowship. She runs the Contact, Cognition, & Change lab, where her group investigates methodological and theoretical issues relating to how multilingualism shapes how languages change.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.