British Asian Undergraduate Students in London

Abstract

These quotes are taken from interviews with Aisha, Tahir and Geet, three British Asian undergraduates studying at Millennium University,¹ one of London’s post-1992 universities. They are responding to a question concerning the associations they make with the different languages in their life. Their answers show that they live in a ‘multilingual’ world comprised of English, in which they experience much of their daily life in London, and the language(s) associated with their heritage culture. While they are ‘multilingual’ in the sense that their language repertoire embraces varieties of English and ‘community’ languages common in Britain (Martin-Jones and Jones, 2000), this in no way determines either their ‘expertise’ or their ‘affiliation’ (Leung, Harris and Rampton, 1997) to their ancestral languages. In fact, unlike the participants in Chapters 5–7, their greatest expertise is in English and not their ‘mother tongue’.

English I would say is my everyday language, I think in English as well… it’s part of my everyday. Urdu is…part of my everyday as well…I communicate with my parents in Urdu [and] the rest of my family. So English and Urdu are both equal in my mind…And Punjabi I hear everyday anyway because my parents talk it at home.

(Aisha, 7/12/2001)

When I speak Urdu I think of my parents…when I speak Punjabi for some reason I think of Sikh people, the language belongs to them … When I speak English I don’t think of English people, I think of me. I think of me in England. When I think of Arabic I think of religion because that’s what I was there for. I went [to] Saudi Arabia and MAN it’s …just like 24–7 religion out there.

(Tahir, 7/11/2001)

The good thing about English is…everybody else speaks it as well so …I am able to …communicate with them …Plus I like the music as well… With Gujarati… I’m basically able to communicate with my family and all my uncles… I also have some friends who are Gujarati as well so I am always able to … speak to them …Swahili, I don’t know what to say about that one because I don’t know anyone who speaks Swahili … that is something different.

(Geet, 11/11/2001)