‘As long as we make ourselves stood’: complexity in the linguistic practices of transnational Chinese in Tanzania

Abstract

This article investigates the linguistic practices of an expanded middling group of migrants engaged in the business domain. Taking an ethnographic approach to linguistic data from this Chinese community, the present study argues that scales and chronotopes are pivotal to gaining a nuanced understanding of the complexity of migrants’ linguistic practices. These practices are illuminated by their language choices, linguistic ideologies, and linguistic strategies for coping with their language challenges. This complexity is demonstrated not only in the synchronisation of multiple interacting scales and chronotopes in every here-and-now but also in the dynamicity of migrants’ agentive navigation across divergent chronotopes and scales. This research contributes to the understanding of the linguistic practices of middling group migrants in South-South migration and advances the perspective of complexity in sociolinguistics and migration studies while also enriching the scalar-chronotopic approach to linguistic analysis.

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