Between Text and Talk: Expertise, Normativity, and Scales of Belonging in the Montreal Tamil Diasporas.

Abstract

In the global city-region of Montreal, Tamil-speaking residents are orienting themselves to multiple homelands, nations, and diasporas of different spatial and temporal scales. These scales of belonging are constituted by regimenting linguistic forms, practices, and speakers into a series of hierarchical relationships that are recursively modeled on the ideological distinctions between “text” and “talk”. Various language ideologies contribute to this politics of regimentation, including the globally dominant ethnolinguistic language ideology, the locally-specific language ideology of sociolinguistic compartmentalization, and the regionally-specific diglossia language ideology. Out of these mutually reinforcing ideologies and institutions have emerged two morally incommensurable Tamil sociolinguistic personas. In the Indian Tamil diaspora, the cultivation of talk-like expertise in Tamil is celebrated as an index of speakers’ globalizing and modernist moral sensibilities. In the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, the cultivation of text-like expertise in Tamil is celebrated as an index of speakers’ purist and primordialist moral sensibilities. There is a complementarity to this division of language labor, with Indian Tamils entrusted to modernize the prestige of the mother tongue and Sri Lankan Tamils entrusted to preserve the purity of the literary standard. The expansion of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, with its heritage language institutions and textual facades, and the increase in Indian Tamil linguistic entrepreneurs testifies to the profitability of this arrangement for both Montreal Tamil groups. Each Tamil diaspora also socializes its youth to endorse mutually-opposed ethnonational Tamil personas while cultivating similar linguistic repertoires. Thus, even though 2nd generation Indian Tamils are socialized to speak English and colloquial Tamil and Sri Lankan Tamils are socialized to speak French and literary-stylized Tamil, incentives to habitually code-switch between Tamil, English, and/or French have caused these linguistic repertoires to converge. Sometimes, such acts of code-switching/code-mixing are intended to shift the normative scale of the communicative encounter or the discursive frame. For Sri Lankan Tamil nationalists, the political uncertainties of the refugee experience will precipitate a shift in the inter-discursive frame between diaspora and homeland. For other Montreal Tamils, the racialization of “tamouls” as permanent “étrangers” will prompt attempts to shift the scales of communicative encounters between majority and minority interlocutors.