How is the Endangered Language Mauritian Bhojpuri Maintained in the Home? A Family Language Policy Study in Mauritius
Study funded by the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund (PIs: Hannah Davidson and Tejshree Auckle, Senior Collaborator: Mooznah Auleear Owodally)
Mauritius is an ethnically diverse African island to the east of Madagascar, where people of African, Indian, Chinese and European origin co-exist. Mauritian Bhojpuri used to be spoken as an inter-ethnic lingua franca, but today it is only spoken actively by around 2.4 percent of the population. Numbers have fallen dramatically over recent decades due to language shift to French, English and/or Mauritian Creole, therefore Mauritian Bhojpuri is in danger of extinction.
As well as facilitating closer collaboration between Cambridge and Mauritian researchers, this project will gather preliminary data in two multigenerational Mauritian families. The interdisciplinary framework of Family Language Policy (FLP) will be employed to investigate both overt and covert ways that families manage their language usage. In terms of language endangerment, conducting conversational recordings and ethnographic observation will be a first step to documenting the speech of elderly Mauritian Bhojpuri family members. In addition to this, semi-structured interviews will explore current ideologies and management strategies to establish how successful language revitalisation initiatives are likely to be in the future.
Combining FLP and language endangerment approaches will provide a unique insight into the status of an endangered language within a highly multilingual context, applicable to other African contexts and beyond.
Keywords: Mauritius, Endangered Languages, Mauritian Bhojpuri, Family Language Policy
Hannah Davidson
Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics and Associate Lecturer in German
I am a Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics at Newnham College, Cambridge and Associate Lecturer in German at the Open University.