Linguistic Negotiations of Identity Among Malay-Muslim Male Youths in Singapore

Abstract

This dissertation examines the lived experiences of four young Malay/Muslim males in Singapore. Through a critical sociolinguistic approach, the dissertation draws on individual and group observations, interactions and interviews to elicit perspectives on postnationalistic constructions of identity and language in a localised setting. The analysis shows how the negotiation of identities is tied closely to the Malay/Muslim male youths’ experiences growing up, against a backdrop of inherited social structuration and ethnolinguistic marginality, within the rigid management of ethnicity by the State and, its intrusions into the affairs of Islam. The dissertation argues that the relationship between language and ethnicity is not entirely about agency (i.e. what a person chooses to be). Instead, it is about markets within which agency and habitus work themselves out in the contexts of specific histories and politics. The negotiation of the Malay/Muslim identity in dominant discourses is further implicated by the ideological construction of homogeneity and linguistic difference, and has essentialised the Malay/Muslim habitus. In many cases, this has resulted in the normalisation of marginality, exclusion and symbolic domination by those in the market. The examples of constrained agency, of structural marginalisation and of investments in the Malay/Muslim identity that support this research shed some critical light on the complicated political economy of language and identity in the Malay/Muslim market.