Making the Classroom a Home: African and Caribbean Language Courses as a Site of Identity Formation and Community Building for Heritage Language Students at Princeton University

Abstract

This senior thesis considers how African and Caribbean language course offerings function as a site of community building and identity formation for heritage language students at Princeton University. Heritage language students are loosely defined as students who have a personal relationship to a language other than the dominant one of the societies in which they live (Fishman, Valdes 2001), and in this case, English. Princeton offers two spoken African languages, Twi and Swahili, and recently, Haitian Kreyól as its first Caribbean language. Heritage language students at Princeton are not always enrolled students of these courses given they are limited in number but are at once students at the University and still heritage language speakers regardless of fluency. The terms ‘heritage language’ and ‘student’ therefore index special relationships between certain academic and extracurricular spaces, namely the language classrooms and language tables, and how these students form relationships and understand their heritage identities during their time at Princeton. Through fieldwork conducted at multi-modal fieldsites at Princeton, including the TWI 107 spring course, the Twi and Wolof Language Tables, and the Fifth International Conference on Heritage and Community Languages at University of California, Los Angeles, this thesis is situated within a broader interdisciplinary context of heritage language studies, African studies, and anthropology. By conducting semi-structured interviews with students of diverse linguistic backgrounds, some enrolled in the offered courses and others who still forge communities built around language in lieu of an offered course, this thesis argues for a broader understanding and adoption of heritage language learning pedagogy as central to the cultivation of a sense of belonging at Princeton for students.