Heritage and identity: Ethnic minority students from South Asia in Hong Kong

► The ethnic minority students negotiate and contest their heritage identity. ► These students make efforts to maintain their heritage language proficiency. ► These students utilize heritage and knowledge they have gained in the host context. ► These students resist the lower social status of the minority identity. ► These students’ linguistic and cultural resources are to be fully utilized. This article investigates the language attitudes, language practices and identity construction of a group of ethnic minority students in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Drawing on data from focus group and individual interviews, this research shows that the ethnic minority students negotiate and contest their heritage identity by utilizing their heritage and the experiences and knowledge they have gained in the host context. In addition, the students construct a counter-discourse to resist the lower social status of their heritage languages and minority identity by maintaining their heritage language, by promoting the dominant status of English and by devaluing the local language; however, these steps may limit their linguistic choices and lead to discrimination against other languages. This paper implies that school administrators and policy makers had better seek to establish a more supportive environment for language learning by immigrant students, and that the students themselves can utilize their multicultural and multilingual backgrounds to empower themselves in the host context and enjoy more equal opportunities.