New Member: Sonya Hamel

By: gna

Sonya Hamel is engaged in a PhD research project focusing on long-term adult Swiss immigrants to New Zealand, using a poststructuralist-inflected approach to identity. This sociolinguistic hybrid study of Swiss adult first and (New Zealand-born) second generation immigrants has a specific focus on their new identity construction processes through their first language and source culture maintenance in the New Zealand target culture environment.

Sonya Hamel is a Swiss-born (Solothurn) adult immigrant to New Zealand herself, having emigrated in 1980. Her  special area of interest in Sociolinguistics at the Linguistics Programme at Otago University is identity construction of long-term, adult immigrants to New Zealand.