Community languages of New Zealand are of interest to scholars, decision makers and community members themselves. This interest has been the focus of a stream of research in New Zealand. Many studies shed light upon speech communities (e.g. Adlam, 1987; Gharibi, 2016; Roberts, 2005) while other studies focused on specific ethnic groups (Al-Sahafi, 2015; Al-Sahafi & Barkhuizen, 2006; Harlow & Barbour, 2013; Revis, 2015). Notwithstanding, investigating community language use through the lens of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) is rarely reported. This project does that by looking at Hindi, the fourth most common language after English, Te Reo Māori and Samoan, with over 66,000 speakers in New Zealand (Statistics New Zealand, 2013). Hindi and Samoan do not have official status in the country, and although Samoan enjoys dedicated ministry support, Hindi goes without this kind of support (Seals & Olsen-Reeder, 2017). Furthermore, Hindi is a language that has not received much research attention to date.
This presentation comes from a larger project that investigates language maintenance and shift within a New Zealand Hindi speaking community (a community whose members belong to different Indian linguistic and social backgrounds). The project specifically sheds light on their language practices and attitudes towards the languages they use, drawing upon a combination of Haugen’s (1972) Ecology of Language and Lewis & Simons’(2010) EGIDS. The project includes data obtained by means of observation, interviews, recordings of naturally occurring home interaction, and stimulated recall sessions, and the data focused on in this presentation were gathered by means of the observations (10 sessions, three of which were audio-recorded) made at the Hindi Community School and informal interviews with eight key members of the community.
The results from this research show how speakers of Hindi in this New Zealand community are part of a 'community of practice', and evidence from the recorded discourse will be used to support this argument. Results will also show how Hindi is perceived as a unifying symbol within this New Zealand Indian community and how this contributes to language maintenance efforts.
