7 - Identity alignment in Malay and Asian-Portuguese Diaspora

Summary

And so to resume, science has determined that in the beginning there was only one group – in any event not more than a few. With time, others developed. Curious, that a new group, arriving on the scene, as it were, would not first survey the terrain, size up the situation, listen to the prevailing parlance. No – it emerges with its own language, its own pantheon of gods, its own universe of traditions. With relative immediacy it demonstratively underscores its own otherness.

Ryszard Kapuściński (2004 : 172)

As suggested in previous chapters (in particular chapters 3 to 6), in multilingual ecologies we may find communities that, in certain socio-historical environments, undergo a change in their linguistic repertoire through contact. I have described these environments as often involving closely knit minority/diasporic groups of mixed ethnic origins, often in the position of intercultural brokers. I have already argued (see in particular chapters 4 and 5) that language contact and contact languages are in fact quite common in human history, exotic as they may appear to the Western monolingual speaker. We should therefore find ways in which to view such ecologies as not ‘special’ or abnormal, because multilingualism is at least just as common as monolingualism in current societies.

Too often do linguists identify a speech community with a single language, even when it is clear that the community is characterized by multilingualism, and too often do we find that one particular language is exclusively linked to the cultural identity of a group.