Ethnic Identity and Acculturation of South Asian Adolescents: A British Perspective

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Abstract
This paper presents an up-to-date review of the field. One of the main findings to emerge from a literature survey on the identity of Asian young people concerns the saliency of ethnicity. Ethnicity seems to be rooted in religion and language, which in many instances is only symbolic in nature, ie the young people are not always practising their religion, nor are they learning to read and write their ancestral language (see Modood et al., 1994). The emergence of ethnicity is instead largely attributed to two factors: in-group belongingness on the one hand, and the experience of racism on the other. Furthermore, it emerges that ethnic identity develops as does the ego-identity, and that Marcia's model, as adapted by Phinney (1996a, b), is conceptually sound and a pragmatic procedure to understand ethnicity and its associations with the family of other concepts. Thirdly, it appears that a majority of the young people are learning to be bicultural and bilingual (at a spoken level) and are developing ‘hyphenated’ identities. At the one end of the assimilation- separation continuum, are a very few Hindu young people, who are likely to seek assimilation to the British way of life, while at the other end are the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who are prone to emphasise their distinctive Muslim identity and to seek merely a form of accommodation with their host culture. The majority of young people of Indian background (including those who migrated from East Africa) are pursuing a ‘middle way’ of integration between the two cultures.