Introduction

The population of Malaysia is ethnically and linguistically heterogenous. It is made up of Bumiputra (65.1%) of whom the Malays are the majority, Chinese (26%), Indians (7.7%) and other ethnic groups (Table 1.1). The Malaysian Iyers are a part of the Malaysian Indian community and make up approximately 0.09% of the Indian population in Malaysia. Their mother tongue is Tamil, although they speak a variety known as Iyer Tamil (see Bright & Ramanujam 1981: 2; Karunakaran & Sivashanmugam 1981: 59; Varma 1989: 188).

Research shows that there is a significant shift to English and Malay among minority Indian communities in Malaysia from different linguistic backgrounds, such as with the Tamils (David & Naji 2000), Sindhis (David 1996), Punjabis (Kundra 2001), Bengalis (Mukherjee 2003) and Malayalees (Govindasamy & Nambiar 2003).

In a recent study conducted on the language shift and maintenance of the Malaysian Iyers (Sankar 2004), it was found that the Malaysian Iyers have moved away from the use of their mother tongue (Tamil) in the home. Social and formal domains of reading and writing have included English and Malay in their linguistic repertoire. Tamil is retained in the religious domain for the purposes of prayer. The extensive shift away from their ethnic language is probably largely due to external pressures such as government language policies and the influence of English as the language of business. The results also showed that the Iyer identity is not completely dependent on their ethnic language, as their identity is expressed more through their cultural practices (see David 1998). This chapter describes the research conducted to try and understand the relationship between language shift and ethnic identity.

Methodology

A two-pronged emic and etic approach was used so that respondents’ views could be balanced with the researcher's views. A domain-based questionnaire was administered to 291 respondents to obtain a macro picture of the community's language shift and language maintenance patterns. However, such an analysis by itself will not reveal individual language choice, nor can it provide an ethnography of communication. Therefore, the questionnaire content was complemented with micro methods that would reveal actual language maintenance and shift. Intra community conversations (of 115 respondents) were audiotaped and analysed using Hymes’ Ethnography of Communication (Hymes 1977) which helped to investigate in greater detail the ethnography of speaking by investigating speaker rules of interaction and the dominant languages that were actually spoken by respondents.