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Reconceptualizing Aunty as an address term in urban multilingual Malaysia
Author(s) -
Lee Sarah,
Shanmuganathan Thilagavathi
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/weng.12433
Subject(s) - modernity , salient , kuala lumpur , ethnic group , sociology , interpersonal communication , context (archaeology) , gender studies , linguistics , term (time) , social science , geography , political science , anthropology , philosophy , physics , archaeology , marketing , quantum mechanics , law , business
Abstract This paper explores contact reconceptualizations of English Aunty as an address term in Greater Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In this multiethnic and multilingual city, Aunty is used in local discourses to address older females across different languages and regardless of whether Addressee is related to the Addresser. Moreover, usage of Aunty is extensive, covering a range of social roles, identities, and interpersonal relations that reflect acculturations to a context where diverse traditional cultural norms, multilanguage mixing, and modernity effects, are simultaneously salient. Using the Cultural Linguistics framework (Sharifian, 2017a, 2017b), it is demonstrated that long‐established Malaysian cultural priorities, race (ethnicity) and modern as status (modernity values) can help account for the potential range of usages of Malaysian Aunty .