"Should I speak Portuguese or English?" : ethnic and social identity construction in the language choices of Brazilian mothers and their mixed-heritage children at home and in a community language school in the UK

This study focuses on language and identity issues within the Brazilian community in England, a group which is informally believed to reach up to 100,000 members in London alone. More specifically, this is an investigation of how identity influences the language choice of a group of Brazilian mothers and their mixed-heritage children who are growing up in London. I consider the importance of combining macro- and micro-perspectives to the understanding of language and identity issues and argue that these two perspectives need to be linked to each other by a ‘brought-from-within’ perspective. Therefore, I explore the mothers’ sense of ethnicity as well as their children’s positioning in relation to the languages and identities available to them through the use of qualitative interviews. In addition, I record the child participants’ oral interactions at home and in a Brazilian Community Language School. Information on the participants’ views of, beliefs about and values in language and identity is used in the analysis of the interactional meaning of the use of different languages in the recordings. Overall, I argue that the children in this study refer to their experiences of identity and language at two levels: feelings and facts. The interaction of these two aspects of their experiences influences how they self-identify at different moments. Furthermore, this study pinpoints four objective and four subjective criteria which affect these children’s self-identification and which affect how they use language as a marker of their "hybrid" ethnic identities and their multiple social identities.