LEE-DOCUMENT-2015.Pdf
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
ABSTRACT An Interactional Account of Multilingual Usage Patterns in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - a High Contact Area by Sarah Lee This thesis provides an interactional account of multilingual usage patterns found in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, the capital city and major commercial center in this internationally-focused country, can be described as a "high contact" area, where several languages (the major ones being Malay, Sinitic (especially Cantonese, Southern Min and Mandarin) and Tamil) are in intensive and extensive contact. The approach taken here argues that an important aspect of exploring language usage patterns, especially in understudied locales such as Kuala Lumpur, necessarily involves situating the investigation in the wider local context, since emergent patterns of language use also reflect reflexivity between speakers as social actors and salient macro-level conditions (Agha 2007, van Dijk 2008,2009, Stroud 2004, Gumperz 1992, 1982, amongst others). I first elaborate on two salient social conditions in Kuala Lumpur: (1) pluralistic organization of Malaysian society through three ethnic constructs – Malays, Chinese and Indians, and (2) expression of cosmopolitanism of mainstream Kuala Lumpur. Next, using procedures from interactional linguistics developed to account for code- switching elsewhere (Gafaranga 2005, Auer 1985), I demonstrate how such social conditions as schematic representations can organize language selection patterns. I then apply these procedures to the exploration of usage patterns of specific language units. Some of them, e.g., discourse particles lah and ah24, and person reference forms, are well-researched, but typically from the context of particular languages. Others, such as the entry of English discourse marker like into KL speech, have not been researched in any depth. What these usage patterns share in common is that they regularly occur across more than one language. Departing from a language-particular approach, I demonstrate that we can analyze usage patterns through another dimension - a multilingual usage perspective. I propose that alongside other considerations, there are also interactional reasons for such convergences. Interactional reasons can emerge from local context of the text or from situational aspects, such as participant backgrounds and discourse topic. I show that in these multilingual usage patterns, traces of social conditions are present, via indexation of social schemas, or indirectly, through the action of actually selecting multilingual patterns. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have achieved this goal without the tremendous support and patience of my Committee. To Professor Michel Achard especially, you never relented about the worthiness of this project and pushed me to explore the data in ways I had not considered. You always had something insightful to say, and your guidance throughout the entire period was invaluable. I cannot thank you enough for your mentorship. To Professor Robert Englebretson, thank you for making me question my assumptions about these languages. It made me a better thinker for it. I also appreciated your detailed comments and your classes, from which I always learned so much. To Professor Kerry Ward, your suggestions and comments on writing about social history were indispensable for improving this crucial part of the dissertation. I am also very grateful for the support of the Linguistics Department and the many wonderful people in it. I would particularly like to mention the following: Professor Nancy Niedzielski, for your classes sparked my interest in social aspects of language use; Mrs Rita Riley, the Department Coordinator, for your care, kind words at just the right time, and everything else you do to make the administrative side of things so much easier; other students in the Department, former and present, for all the discussions, conversations, and friendships, especially Andrew Pantos, Nori Nagaya, Sarah Seewoester Cain, Katie Nelson, Cassandra Pace, Haowen Jiang, Jennifer Hoecker, and Anne-Marie Hartenstein. This thesis also benefited from suggestions and insights from many others. Amongst those, I particularly want to mention Professors Sarah Thomason, Lisa Lim, James Stanford, Lionel Wee, Kang Kwong Luke, Uzma Quraishi, Timothy Daniels, Rajend Mesthrie, Devyani Sharma, and David Gil. I would also like to thank Karl Anderbeck for our discussions about Kuala Lumpur. This work of course could not have happened without all the Malaysians who participated in this study, and/or who gave suggestions and advice on the local KL scene. I am indebted to you for opening up your personal lives and giving up your time to me so generously. Finally, thank you to my family for encouraging me to keep going. I am eternally grateful to my mother and Mike, who came all the way from Australia to help me in the last stretch, and also my Malaysian relatives and friends who assisted in so many ways. And last but not least, to my two precious Bs – Benjy and Beet, this is for you. Contents Chapter 1 – Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 – Social organizational structures in KL and Malaysia ............................................. 16 2.0 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 16 2.1 Social context and language contact ............................................................................... 17 2.2 Conceptualizing the Malaysian social context ................................................................ 21 2.3 Schematic representations of social conditions in KL...................................................... 22 2.3.1 Malaysia’s diverse groups ......................................................................................... 27 2.3.2 Malay special privilege ............................................................................................ 56 2.3.3 Pursuit of modernity values and cosmopolitanism ................................................... 64 2.3.3.1 Malay Urbanization and Cosmopolitanism ............................................................ 68 2.3.3.2 Transnationalist cosmopolitanism ......................................................................... 82 2.4 Position and status of Kuala Lumpur in the Malaysian nation ........................................ 93 2.5 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 103 Chapter 3 – Multilingual Usage Patterns in Code Selection Practices ..................................... 105 3.0 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 105 3.1 Methodological issues relating to the data .................................................................... 106 3.1.1 Terminology ........................................................................................................... 106 3.1.2 Encoding of language in the data ........................................................................... 111 3.1.3 Sampling and participant information ................................................................... 115 3.1.4 Data collection procedures ..................................................................................... 116 3.2 Social interaction & multilingualism ............................................................................ 117 3.2.1 Socially-based explanations ................................................................................... 124 3.2.2 Organizational explanations ................................................................................... 128 3.3 Evidence of social relations in medium selection .......................................................... 153 3.3.1 Participant-related switching ................................................................................. 153 3.3.2 Social relations and code selection in KL ............................................................... 166 3.4 Usage patterns of linguistic units in multilingual talk................................................... 183 3.5 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 192 Chapter 4 – Usage Patterns of Person Reference Forms .......................................................... 196 4.0 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 196 4.1 Theoretical Points ......................................................................................................... 197 4.2 Person reference forms in the data ............................................................................... 202 4.2.1 English person reference forms .............................................................................. 210 4.3 Socio-cultural metapragmatic norms ............................................................................ 211 4.3.1 Alignment with race............................................................................................... 211 4.4 Aligning with ‘localness’ ............................................................................................... 227 4.5 Alignment of English forms with ‘modernity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ ........................... 233 4.5.1. English I/you as Malay address forms