Thilagavathi Shanmuganathan - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Thilagavathi Shanmuganathan

GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 2022

The world in general was not prepared for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Dec... more The world in general was not prepared for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in December 2019, which caused massive deaths. Government officials were forced to impose drastic measures to curb the spread. The Ministry of Health relied on political leaders and government agencies to help disseminate as much health information and the government policies efficiently and effectively. As these representatives or leaders belong to different ethnicities, they are more likely to understand the life circumstances, needs, strengths, and capabilities of multicultural and vulnerable communities, and would be the best people to convey the needed information. Tamils are the third largest community in Malaysia and there is not much research done on Tamil language and communication strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, this study aims to observe on how effectively Tamil language and culture influences crisis communication. Effective communication and leadership are central to the management of pandemics and to give the public assurance in order to alleviate their fears and anxiety in having to adapt to the rapidly changing societal and economic landscape. Based on the communication strategies recommended by Hyland-Wood et al (2021), the current study focuses on how a Malaysian Indian politician, Saravanan responds, engages, and communicates with his followers. Seventeen Facebook posts in Tamil on Saravanan’s page were extracted and analysed qualitatively. The strategies utilized by Saravanan showed his resolve and effectiveness in managing crisis. This study will be useful for political leaders, community representatives, and medical practitioners in seeking equitable accessibility to quality health care and well-being of the people. © 2022, Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.

IARS International Research Journal, 2022

When a minority group interacts and comes into contact with individuals from the dominant languag... more When a minority group interacts and comes into contact with individuals from the dominant language, they tend to choose a commonly understood language. Language choice is forced to negotiate their own identity and cultural practices with their dominant culture. This can create a conflict, as in the case of the Punjabi community, who try to adopt new cultural norms and maintain their own identity when living in a dominant cultural group. With the growing number of Punjabis in Sabah, specifically in the capital city of Kota Kinabalu, East Malaysia, this situation presents an excellent case for advancing our knowledge about the challenges that the process of assimilation and enculturation may have on the Punjabi community living in a society which predominantly is of a different culture in Sabah. This study thus addresses the impact of social integration among a small population of the Punjabi Sikhs living in Kota Kinabalu. Data is collected using a questionnaire and interviews with se...

In attempting to provide empirical qualitative data analysis, the re-searcher has to work within ... more In attempting to provide empirical qualitative data analysis, the re-searcher has to work within many constraints. There are ethical issues that need to be considered and evaluated in the managing of data, especially one that is naturally occurring. One of the more popular methods of ‘capturing ’ this data is through audio recording and to be able to record, prior permission has to be sought. This pre-requisite is in itself a constraint within which a young researcher has to persevere. This research is part of PhD work in progress and relates the many constraints faced and coming to the crossroads between ethics and the observer’s paradox (Labov cited in Kontra and Varadi 1997). This work does no prescribe alternative methods in the recording and col-lection of data, but highlights the problems that emerged in the process of doing research.

A marriage of convenience:

Ethnic conflicts have been one of the biggest single threats for the progress of collaborative hu... more Ethnic conflicts have been one of the biggest single threats for the progress of collaborative human societies. Ethnic issues are common to most multi-ethnic societies. Some of the conflicts are violent and damaging but not all are negative. Owing to the rapid growth of ethnic problems, attempts have been made to overcome them across many nations despite the change in governments or government policies in recent years. However, so far none of the discussions and solutions is able to explain the influence of socio-cultural evolution on the changes in ethnic identities in multi-ethnic society and the effect on the minority. Further, attention is given to discuss the impact of socio-cultural formation topologies of multi-ethnic societies on ethnic issues. In this concept paper, authors explain the socio-cultural evolution process of multi-ethnic societies and the impact of ethnic topologies on ethnic conflicts.

International Journal of Language and Culture

This study investigates the cultural conceptualization of marriage among Tamil Hindu communities ... more This study investigates the cultural conceptualization of marriage among Tamil Hindu communities in Australia and Malaysia. The Hindu cultural schema of marriage relates to the physical, social and spiritual aspects, and language acts as the central aspect of the cultural cognition of the community. Data is based on a variety of sources, particularly focus group discussions, translated verses from Hindu Holy Scriptures (Vedanta), and personal interviews. Findings show various cultural schemas entrenched within the marriage schema, particularly Vedic Astrology, Sacred Invocation and Blessings, which are shared knowledge among community members. The cultural schema of marriage (or vivaha) that is instantiated in the Vedanta considers marriage a religious obligation (Dharma). It is during social interactions that the cultural metaphors associated with marriage are discussed. marriage as a thousand-year crop and marriage as a journey are metaphorical expressions that illustrate the trad...

GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies

Online social networking sites have become an integral platform in the development of relationshi... more Online social networking sites have become an integral platform in the development of relationships among Internet users around the world. The Internet has made connectivity faster and stronger than the old days. However, studies have shown that many have misused this platform to incite hatred and animosity when expressing themselves. Online derogatory expressions include the usage of slurs, pejoratives, hate-speech, flaming, and trolling, among others. The present study aims to analyse defensive strategies employed by Facebook commenters on the issue of 1MDB. Three threads of comments and responses towards the political scandal of 1MDB were identified and extracted from Facebook newspaper page. The data was then analysed using the summary of response options and the list of defensive counterstrategies offered by Bousfield (2007). The findings demonstrated the use of defensive strategies by the participants in disputing criticisms of 1MDB issues, particularly comments affecting the reputation of their social group and ethnicity. Most of the participants chose to contradict the opposition directly; and some of them included statements of clarification, explanation or details about the issue together with the arguments. The discussion of the findings offers some novel insights into the field of impoliteness by drawing attention to online users' defensive linguistic behaviour in dealing with out-group impoliteness strategies in online communication.

3L The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies

Impoliteness has become common among online users and appears to be consented by netizens. This s... more Impoliteness has become common among online users and appears to be consented by netizens. This study seeks to investigate the reaction to impoliteness from the perspective of face-threat witnesses (FTWs) in Facebook comments. Twelve news posts on Facebook regarding the 1MDB scandal in 2015 were selected, and impolite comment threads that were reactions to the news were extracted. Fifty-two threads were found to contain impolite comments targeted at non-participants of this interaction, thus corresponding to the characteristics of face-threat witnesses. Dobs and Blitvich's (2013) model for participant response options, Culpeper's (2011, 2016) Conventionalised Impoliteness Formulae (CIF) and Bousfield's (2007) list of defensive counter-strategies were used to analyse the responses. Impolite responses by the FTWs were found to be atypical. Denying the opposition either via being offensive or defensive subjugated the preference in the findings, though offensive appeared more prominently. Apart from deny opposition, corroborate opposition, and react, the current study also discovered new categories for the response options which did not fit in any of the categories, hence labelled as Distinct Features. The FTWs not only sanctioned impoliteness, but initial impoliteness in their responses, despite being 'other-directed'.

World Englishes

This paper explores contact reconceptualizations of English Aunty as an address term in Greater K... more 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.

This study was conducted using a mixed research method including quantitative and qualitative dat... more This study was conducted using a mixed research method including quantitative and qualitative data collection to investigate the cultural and linguistic practices of the Punjabi Sikhs in Kuching, Sarawak in East Malaysia. It was aimed to determine whether the community had integrated with the majority community/communities in Kuching and to what extend it has preserved its ethnic identity. Data were collected on the Punjabis’ use of language in the domains of family, workplace, and entertainment. Other social factors like eating habits, dressing, celebration of festivals, marriage preference, religious practices and self-identity were also examined. It was identified that the minority community of the Punjabi Sikhs in Kuching, Sarawak has a tendency towards maintaining a strong cultural vitality and uniqueness. The community shows a high degree of assimilating towards the use of English language, although they appear to be maintaining their core Punjabi cultural traits and practices...

– This study was conducted using a mixed research method including quantitative and qualitative d... more – This study was conducted using a mixed research method including quantitative and qualitative data collection to investigate the cultural and linguistic practices of the Punjabi Sikhs in Kuching, Sarawak in East Malaysia. It was aimed to determine whether the community had integrated with the majority community/communities in Kuching and to what extend it has preserved its ethnic identity. Data were collected on the Punjabis’ use of language in the domains of family, workplace, and entertainment. Other social factors like eating habits, dressing, celebration of festivals, marriage preference, religious practices and self-identity were also examined. It was identified that the minority community of the Punjabi Sikhs in Kuching, Sarawak has a tendency towards maintaining a strong cultural vitality and uniqueness. The community shows a high degree of assimilating towards the use of English language, although they appear to be maintaining their core Punjabi cultural traits and practic...

Names and naming practices reflect the socio-cultural background of a community. The giving of na... more Names and naming practices reflect the socio-cultural background of a community. The giving of names is therefore not merely an act of labelling but represents constructs of identity that reflect the collective self-representation of a community and its worldviews. This study examines the naming practices of the Telugu in Malaysia and investigates the morphological structure and the semantic properties of Telugu names. To accomplish those research goals, survey interviews were conducted with 288 respondents in four different Malaysian states. Using descriptive statistics, a narrative analysis of the survey responses was used. Six experts in the Telugu culture were then invited for a focus group discussion. Before the results of this analysis are presented, detailed information about the Telugu and their naming traditions are provided. As will be shown here, among the Telugu, name-giving is a sacred act that is performed during a traditional naming ceremony called the Barasala. Durin...

International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2014

This study investigates how the Sasak people of Lombok Indonesia interact among each other in nat... more This study investigates how the Sasak people of Lombok Indonesia interact among each other in naturallyoccurring interactions. The Politeness theory stipulates that the language of communication associates social reality and language use in real communities. Grice's theory is based on the assumption that people are cooperative in communication. It follows that the notions of politeness are likely to exhibit this observance of being cooperative. However, studies have shown that the Cooperative Principle and the attendant maxims are almost never strictly followed in daily conversations and so, what prompts this non-observation? The Sasak people are known to be naturally shy and communicate with each other using the Nggeto-Nggete dialect. Twenty participants were randomly selected from a population in East Sukamulia, a place where Sasak is spoken. Based on the data collected from informal domestic settings such as exchanges in the shop and home, and between the family and neighbourhood, the extent to which the Cooperative Principle and maxims are observed and the politeness strategies used to perform the exchanges are established. The findings reveal that the Sasak speakers of the Nggeto-Nggete dialect did not observe Grice's maxims and its principles when communicating with each other. They do so in order that they communicate information clearly to each other while observing what they regard to be moral etiquette and standard of decorum.

Naturally-occurring conversations have always been criticized for being chaotic and incoherent . ... more Naturally-occurring conversations have always been criticized for being chaotic and incoherent . The few who have ventured into analyzing spontaneous speech were concerned with the features of speech or patterns of turn-taking Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974;. Besides using simulated contexts, the studies relied on a single method or approach to analyse data. This study investigates naturally-occurring conversations in the context of negotiation and highlights the importance of triangulating approaches as a means of complementing the drawbacks of one method -a marriage of convenience.

Relc Journal, 2005

In attempting to provide empirical qualitative data analysis, the researcher has to work within m... more In attempting to provide empirical qualitative data analysis, the researcher has to work within many constraints. There are many ethical issues that researchers have to consider in the course of managing data, especially naturally occurring data, which needs audio recording and transcribing. And for this purpose, the analyst is required to seek prior permission from the participants. Thus, the reliability

Mel elektronik (e-mel) kini menjadi sejenis sistem komunikasi yang pantas dan efisien. Para pendi... more Mel elektronik (e-mel) kini menjadi sejenis sistem komunikasi yang pantas dan efisien. Para pendidik sedar akan kepentingan e-mel sebagai suatu alat pengajaran bahasa yang berpotensi. Tujuan kajian ini adalah untuk menunjukkan inovasi dalam pengajaran penulisan dalam Bahasa Inggeris melalui e-mel. Di samping itu, kajian ini bertujuan mempertingkatkan interaksi di antara guru dan pelajar serta menarik minat pelajar untuk menulis dalam bahasa kedua tanpa was-was. Kajian ini telah dilaksanakan selama lima minggu dengan melibatkan 89 mesej e-mel. Dengan keizinan pelajar, e-mel telah dimuat turun dan mesejnya diana lisa. Dapatan utama dalam kajian ini menunjukkan e-mel telah mengurangkan jarak interaksi di antara guru dan pelajar serta meningkatkan kekerapan menulis di antara pelajar. Beberapa cadangan diberi untuk menggalakkan penggunaan emel dalam pembelajaran Bahasa Inggeris.