Multiple identities of multilingual minorities? How religious values and other extralinguistic practices influence the social, national and personal identity formation

Abstract

This empirical study examines the ways multilingualism influences the identity of minority individuals and minority groups. The motivations for their specific social behavior are rarely obvious to the multilingual speakers themselves, which made it necessary to scrutinize their behaviors and attitudes using a mixed-methods analysis (including sociolinguistic interviews, questionnaire surveys, and field observations) of the mostly unconscious processes of identity formation among multilingual Kui speakers in northeastern Thailand. The approach used, focusing on group behavior and analyzing extralinguistic sociocultural data in terms of social identity formation in a minority group, revealed specific rituals and practices. These findings add to the knowledge of overt multilingual language use in the context of multilingual Kui people and demonstrate how social psychology and sociology can be used to analyze the identities of multilingual minorities and show how multilingual language use does not produce multiple identities. The investigation, using theories of several social and linguistic approaches to understand identity construction, demonstrates how important the Thai national identity is and how strongly it influences the identity formation among the minority group.