Language and faith encounters: bridging language–ethnicity and language–religion studies

Abstract

There has been growing interest by British policy-makers in the importance of acknowledging the role of migrant children's background in their educational progress. Therefore, this article draws on studies of language–ethnicity and of language–religion to understand the linguistic and the religious heritage of four groups of Brazilian migrants in London. The discussions describe data collected for two studies. The first study was conducted in a Brazilian complementary school and the second in three Brazilian faith settings. A new three-dimensional framework, the Religion–Ethnicity–Language (REL) Triangle, is explained and applied to the two sets of data. It is argued that the REL Triangle framework, which examines religion, ethnicity and language as intersecting aspects of identity, can help in the understanding of children's linguistic and cultural experiences in out-of-school contexts, and thus, allow new links to be developed between mainstream schools and migrant communities.