Abstract
Staicov highlights the necessity to investigate linguistics practices and ethnic identity construction in Chinese Americans. This community and Asian Americans, in general, have received little scholarly attention—a striking fact considering the long history of Asian and Chinese immigrants in the United States. After a short introduction to San Francisco Chinatown, Staicov discusses how language use in the community can correlate with factors such as ethnicity, identity, or transnationalism. Focussing on first- and second-generation Chinese Americans, Staicov outlines how linguistic variation on the morphosyntactic level is used to index belonging to Chinatown, American mainstream society, or both.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This study was partially funded by the Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich, grant no. 56420402.
- 2.
The largest Chinatown in America, with a population of about 450,000, can be found in New York city (Zong and Batalova 2017). Some larger Chinatowns have been established in Canada, namely in Toronto and Vancouver.
- 3.
Labelled a “model minority” (see Sect. 2.4) also implied that Chinese Americans were linguistically fully assimilated into mainstream society.
- 4.
Taking a constructivist approach situates this analysis within the third wave of sociolinguistic variation analysis (Eckert 2012). Linguistic variation is investigated in relation with both macrosocial categories as well as more localised and stylistic practices.
- 5.
This approach to data collection in line with third wave studies in sociolinguistics, which have emphasised the importance of situated use and an ethnographically responsible approach to communities.
- 6.
The six characteristics are (1) dispersion from an original “centre” to a “periphery”; (2) collective memory about the homeland; (3) feeling of not belonging/being fully accepted by the host community; (4) homeland is the ideal home, a place one wants to return to; (5) collective interest in maintaining/supporting the original homeland; and (6) personal relationship to the homeland (Safran 1991: 83–84).
- 7.
Mayer (2005: 13): “eine Gemeinschaft, die sich – durch Vertreibung oder Emigration – von einem ursprünglichen (oder imaginären ursprünglichen) Zentrum an mindestens zwei periphere Orte verteilte”.
- 8.
(1) The emergence principle: Identity is best viewed as the emergent product rather than the pre-existing source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore as fundamentally a social and cultural phenomenon. (2) The positionality principle: Identities encompass (a) macro-level demographic categories; (b) local, ethnographically specific cultural positions; and (c) temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles. (3) The indexicality principle: Identity relations emerge in interaction through several related indexical processes, including (a) overt mention of identity categories and labels; (b) implicatures and presuppositions regarding one’s own or other’s identity position; (c) displayed evaluative and epistemic orientations to on-going talk, as well as interactional footings and participant roles; and (d) the use of linguistics structures and systems that are ideologically associated with specific personas and groups. (4) The relationality principle: Identities are intersubjectively constructed through several, often overlapping complementary relations, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice, and authority/delegitimacy. (5) The partialness principle: Any given construction of identity may be in part deliberate and intentional, in part habitual and hence often less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation and contestation, in part an outcome of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an effect of larger ideological processes and material structures that may become relevant to interaction. It is therefore constantly shifting both as interaction unfolds and across discourse context. (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 588–606)
References
Bell, Allan. 2002. Back in style: Reworking audience design. In Style and sociolinguistic variation, ed. Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford, 139–169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Block, David. 2013. Issues in language and identity research in applied linguistics. ELIA 13: 11–46.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2005. The ‘diaspora’ diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (1): 1–19.
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2004. Language and identity. In A companion to linguistic anthropology, ed. Alessandro Duranti, 369–394. Malden: Blackwell.
———. 2005. Identity in interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7 (4–5): 585–614.
———. 2008. Finding identity: Theory and data. Multilingua 27: 151–163.
Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Duff, Patricia A. 2015. Transnationalism, multilingualism, and identity. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35: 577–580.
Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87–100.
Edwards, John. 2009. Language and identity. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Espiritu, Yen Le, and Thom Tran. 2002. Viêt Nam, Nu’óc Tôi (Vietnam, My Country): Vietnamese Americans and transnationalism. In The changing face of home: The transnational lives of the second generation, ed. Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters, 367–398. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Giles, Howard. 1978. Linguistic differentiation in ethnic groups. In Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations, ed. Henri Tajfel, 361–393. London: Academic Press.
Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. 1992. Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645: 1–24.
Isurin, Ludmila. 2011. Russian diaspora: Culture, identity, and language change. New York: de Gruyter.
Joseph, John E. 2004. Language and identity: National, ethnic, religious. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics.
———. 1972. Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and woman’s place. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 2000. The language war. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mayer, Ruth. 2005. Diaspora: Eine kritische Begriffsbestimmung. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Milroy, Lesley. 1987. Language and social networks. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Milroy, Lesley, and James Milroy. 1992. Social network and social class: Toward an integrated sociolinguistic model. Language in Society 21: 1–26.
OED Online. 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/52085?redirectedFrom=diaspora#eid. Accessed 26 July 2016.
Ong, Aihwa. 1993. On the edge of empires: Flexible citizenship among Chinese in diaspora. Positions 1 (3): 745–778.
———. 1999. Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durham/London: Duke.
Padilla, Amado M., and William Perez. 2003. Acculturation, social identity, and social cognition: A new perspective. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 25 (1): 35–55.
Safran, William. 1991. Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (1): 83–99.
Stets, Jan E., and Peter J. Burke. 2000. Identity theory and social identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly 63 (3): 224–237.
Tabouret-Keller, Andrée. 1998. Language and identity. In The handbook of sociolinguistics, ed. Florian Coulmas, 315–326. Malden: Blackwell.
Tajfel, Henri. 1978a. Interindividual behaviour and intergroup behaviour. In Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations, ed. Henri Tajfel, 27–60. London: Academic Press.
———. 1978b. Social categorization, social identity and social comparison. In Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations, ed. Henri Tajfel, 61–76. London: Academic Press.
Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation. New York: Morrow.
Trudgill, Peter. 1972. Sex, covert prestige, and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich. Language in Society 1: 179–195.
Vertovec, Steven. 2001. Transnationalism and identity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27 (4): 573–582.
———. 2005. The political importance of diasporas, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society Working Paper 13. Oxford: University of Oxford.
Williams, Ashley M. 2008. Brought-along identities and the dynamics of ideology: Accomplishing bivalent stances in a multilingual interaction. Multilingua 27: 37–56.
Wong, Amy Wing-Mei. 2010. New York City English and second generation Chinese Americans. English Today 26 (3): 3–12.
Wong, Amy Wing-mei, and Lauren Hall-Lew. 2014. Regional variability and ethnic identity: Chinese Americans in New York City and San Francisco. Language and Communication 35: 27–42.
Zong, Jie, and Jeanne Batalova. 2017. Chinese immigrants in the United States. Migrationpolicy.org, 29 September 2017. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/chinese-immigrants-united-states. Accessed 24 June 2019.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Staicov, A. (2020). Introduction. In: Creating Belonging in San Francisco Chinatown’s Diasporic Community. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24993-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24993-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24992-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24993-9
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)