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’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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