Migration is a topic that is very personal to me as I myself am an immigrant, having moved from Romania to the UK at the age of 10. Prior to this, my dad was a migrant worker on a strawberry farm in Scotland, where he worked with many other Eastern Europeans. My mother then worked as a cleaner and so they saved up so that they would be financially stable enough to be able to fly me and my siblings over. This type of migration, according to Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2020) would be considered North–North migration, however, I think many parallels can be observed when this is compared to South-North migration and even South-South migration. Having said that, each and every experience is individual no one is the same. Within these, differences, however, I find that those that have migrated will find ways to connect and construct identities for themselves. For example, one of my closest friends is from India and her experience of moving to the UK was one of less financial difficulty but we bonded on the same feelings of being the “other” in a not very diverse school in Essex.
This connection and construction of identity is something that has interested me for a long time now and has led me to conduct a project on Accent, Power and Identity, where I will look at the links between language and identity in the context of a British University, and tying this to power structures in society. A particular reading that I found very useful when preparing for this research project is Bucholtz and Hall’s (2004) exploration of language and identity. There I found terms that related to my own experience. Social grouping, for example, is described by them as a process of “inventing similarity by downplaying difference” (p. 371) – something I described earlier in relation to my friend. Ethnic identities are also described as a means for cultural groups to remain apart through the reification of distinctions of these people who live in juxtaposition to one another (p. 371). These differences can be linguistically reinforced in a society, where immigrants’ accents can be stigmatised and discriminated against due to the existing power imbalance, where they may be seen as a less privileged group.
Migrant identities are then even more individual and therefore complicated to analyse when discussing the connection, they feel to their own home country and the one they reside in. Most people that migrated from a young age will be somewhere in the middle where they do not entirely connect to one over the other, something that also resonates with me. The video that we had to watch on Salman and his experience as a migrant to Saudi Arabia also reiterates this very well. After his struggle of not being fully accepted by the Pakistani community nor by the Saudi community, he very happily accepts the middle ground where he simply sees himself as a multi-faceted human being, complicated but himself: Salman.
I also felt that, after presenting as a group on the music video option and coming to the conclusion that it was difficult to garner whether the migrants were truly given agency or not in this context, it was easy to see that in the video with Salman he was given agency. He told his story in a personal way that did not reduce him to a simple statistic or immigrant.
References
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2004). Language and identity. A companion to linguistic anthropology, 1, 369-394.
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2020) 'Introduction: Recentering the South in Studies of Migration'. Migration and Sociology. 3(1), 1-18.
Thmanyah (2018, May 11). وثائقي: سلمان ابن البلد [Documentary: Salman Ibn Al-Balad] [Video FIle]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra24kdI8E7Q&t=68s
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