HICCS 2025

Title:
"You need to speak better English than Americans!”: First-generation Chinese immigrants’ language ideologies from a trans-sectional perspective

Abstract:
This paper is part of a larger California-based project examining non-native English speaking, first-generation immigrants’ language practices, language attitudes, and language ideologies, all with an eye towards the notion, “be American, speak English.” This paper focuses on 170 cases of first-generation immigrants from Asian countries and regions who speak a variant of Chinese language astheir mother tongue. The interviews were collected through an undergraduate sociolinguistics course between 2017 and 2022. The research subjects are predominantly either college educated or enrolled in post-secondary schools at the time of the interviews. Against the backdrop of the prevailing monoglot ideology in the United States, these immigrants from the Great China Region and Southeast Asian countries express a simultaneous affirmation and negation of American identity through their strategic positioning, domestic language planning in reaction to the dominant language ideology in the United States. Their embodied raciolinguistic ideology manifests in their self-identification as non-American despite naturalization and among the older generation, decades long residence in the United States. Furthermore, they actively reproduce a pecking order within the Chinese immigrant community based on English proficiency. That is to say, the higher the fluency, and with less accent a Chinese immigrant speaks American English, the higher that individual’s self-perceived status in the intra-ethnic group. I highlight how pre-emigration class background, regional identity, and experiences with varieties of English intersect their experiences of racialization in the United States and the myriad nuances and covert hierarchies within the heterogeneous Chinese immigrant community. I explore the self-positioning of Chinese immigrants through a raciolinguistic and trans-sectional perspective, bridging the concepts of translanguaging and intersectionality. Through a trans-sectional lens, this study aims to show the complexity of their translanguaging experience, and how embodied raciolinguistic ideology persistently sets them apart from identifying as American. In examining such a phenomenon among transnational, multilingual subjects, a trans-sectional approach not only embraces the multitude and palimpsests of the subjects’ opinions and experiences, also frees researchers from our own monoglot ideology. For non-white and non-native English speaker Chinese immigrants, they do not “look American,” but in their mind, they can try to sound American, i.e. speak English with an American accent, to seek and acquire acceptance. Their legal status, educational level, professional career, financial capacity or lifestyle notwithstanding, they are aware that they can never truly belong, when in their own minds, being American means being white and possessing the “correct” linguistic capital to be recognized as a native speaker – native speaker as “a static, monolithic, and privileged inner-circle norm against which all others are evaluated” (Aneja 2016, pp. 361). According to the trans-sectional indexicality, first-generation immigrants’ experiences tell a story of constant negotiation, struggle, and reconciliation to the fact that individual agency can only achieve so much when Americanness is mostly misconceptualized and internalized as a racio-ethnic category in U.S. society.