New York City English and second generation Chinese Americans

Abstract

Although Chinese Americans set up Chinese heritage language schools as early as 1848 to preserve the heritage language and to promote a sense of ethnic identity among their American-born children (Chao, 1997), there is strong evidence that language shift to English is taking place rather rapidly within the Chinese communities across the U.S. Data from the 2006 ACS show that while only 34.1 percent of first generation (i.e. foreign-born) Chinese Americans reported speaking ‘English very well’, the percentages rise dramatically for those who are American-born (i.e. second generation and beyond) or born overseas but arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 (i.e. the 1.5 generation). 70.4 percent of the 1.5 generation and 93.8 percent of the American-born Chinese Americans reported speaking ‘English very well’. Additionally, only about 27.6 percent of the ABCs were estimated to speak their heritage language at home. Taken together, these estimates suggest that the rate of shift from Chinese to English is accelerating. Jia (2008) finds that even for first generation Chinese Americans, their Chinese language skills continue to decline with increasing English immersion. Rapid language shift to English means that many ABCs speak English as one of their native languages, if not the only one. This raises interesting sociolinguistic questions concerning the characteristics of the English spoken by ABCs and how ABCs utilize varieties of English to construct and negotiate differences with respect to each other and vis-à-vis the larger social structure.

Coding for Demographic Categories in the Creation of Legacy Corpora: Asian American Ethnic Identities

“…In an earlier study, Wong (, ) examined four New York‐born and raised Chinese American females of Cantonese descent, between the ages of 18–29 at the time of data collection in 2006. She measured these four individuals' cultural/lifestyle orientation and their social network (Milroy , ) using a set of questionnaires (Tsai et al ; Kirke ).…”

“…Of the four females, two had a non‐Chinese dominant social network and a more unidimensional orientation toward an American lifestyle. These are also the speakers who pronounced a raised‐ bought vowel (in words like thought and caught ), the variant that is stereotypically linked to the New Yorker persona (Wong ; Becker ; Wong and Hall‐Lew ), more frequently. This study indicates that variation in social network and cultural orientation corresponds to differences in the use of regional phonological features.…”

“…The study by Wong (, ) discussed above used two questionnaires to collect information on ethnic orientation. They are essentially two versions of the same 27 statements that differ only in the reference culture.…”

“…These scores are useful for corpus annotation, as speaker‐specific metadata, and for analysis, as predictor variables. The scores are also comparable to one another, such as in Wong's (, ) third score of cultural orientation for each speaker, a score of difference, which was calculated by subtracting an individual's Chinese score from their American score.…”

“…Reyes and Lo ). For example, as far as we are aware, there are only a relative handful of quantitative sociophonetic studies that explicitly examine the use of regional phonological/phonetic features by American‐born individuals of Asian heritage, and most of these consider only East Asian heritage groups (Mendoza‐Denton and Iwai ; Lee ; Wong ; Hall‐Lew ; Becker ; Ito ; Wong ; Kaiser ; Newman and Wu ; Wong ; Hall‐Lew ; Wong and Hall‐Lew ). Related work in linguistic anthropology has contributed to the breadth of heritage ethnicities represented in sociolinguistics more broadly, with a particular focus on communities of South and Southeast Asian Americans (e.g., Reyes , ; Shankar ; Bucholtz [2004]; Shankar ).…”