Multilingualism, Ethnic Conflict and the Configuration of Difference among Sri Lankan Muslims

Often excluded from mainstream scholarly representations of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, Sri Lankan Muslims were victims of war-related violence, ethnic discrimination, and economic hardship. Since the late 19 th century, Sri Lankan Muslims have maintained a separate ethno-religious identity from Sinhalese and Tamils. Muslims living in the Sinhalese-majority South speak Tamil as a first language, but are highly multilingual in Sinhala, Sri Lanka's national language, and English. Drawing on research completed in Kandy, Sri Lanka during the last phase of the civil war (2007-2008), this paper shows how a Muslim family, in interactions in the home, draw on voicing to produce configurations of ethnic difference. I focus on one example where, the speaker, in the context of a conversation about the general nature of the ethnic conflict, employs linguistic resources including code, volume, pitch, and poetic parallelism to imitate the voice of Sinhalese who are voicing the violent inner thoughts of Tamils toward them. This example of embedded voicing reveals the speaker's construal of what Sinhalese believe Tamils are capable of doing to them, as well as how the directive for committing such violent acts may not come from the self but from elsewhere. In addition, the use of embedded voicing allows the speaker to evaluate Tamils while deferring responsibility for this evaluation. This paper argues that such complex and varied positions and meta-positions on morality and agency are involved in the way in which speakers draw on their complex linguistic repertoires to define themselves in relation to other ethnic groups.