Having dumplings with a fork: language use and ideologies of a Fuzhounese-American youth

Abstract

This case study investigates the language use and ideologies of a Chinese-American youth who speaks English, Mandarin, and Fuzhounese, and lives in a predominantly white town. It addresses the scarcity of research on Chinese heritage speakers of varieties in addition to Mandarin, particularly those living outside Chinese communities with extensive heritage language resources. The participant mainly spoke standard English in formal domains, colloquial English informally, and a mixture of English and basic Mandarin at home with his parents, while predominantly using English with his sister. He knew only a few words in Fuzhounese, which was rarely spoken in his daily life. His language ideologies interacted with his identity as a Chinese-American, perceptions of linguistic hegemony, and iconization pertaining to different ethnic communities. He viewed Mandarin as his heritage language with global significance, while Fuzhounese, despite of not mutually comprehensible with Mandarin, was only regarded as a dialect by him, iconized with negative stereotypes about rural Fuzhou and Brooklyn Chinatown. The study enhances our understanding of how multilingual children from immigrant families navigate different languages, and provides implications for offering culturally and linguistically sensitive support for immigrant families speaking less commonly taught languages outside their ethnic communities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.