The English of adolescent and young adult Vietnamese refugees in the United States

Abstract

Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, significant numbers of Vietnamese refugees have been arriving in the United States. The current situation gives rise to unique laboratory for observing the development of a variety of English, given the social circumstances that led to the abrupt influx of refugees. Based on sociolinguistic interviews with over 90 subjects in Northern Virginia, Christian et al. (1983) have described the ethnographic aspects of language usage and maintenance and the development of particular phonological amd grammatical features of English among four different age groups (10-12, 15-18, 20-25 and 35-55), and two different lengths of residency groups (1-3 and 4-7 years of residency) of Vietnamese immigrants. Language values and attitudes encourage both the use and maintenance of Vietnamese in some situations as well as the development of English proficiency. The specific investigation of English structures such as plural, third person singular absence, multiple negation, and unmarked tense indicates that the emerging variety is resisting diffusion from the nonstandard dialects of English while perpetuating some modification of English structures that may give rise to a unique ethnic variety of English.

Convergence and language shift in New Zealand: Consonant cluster reduction in 19th Century Maori English

“…First, the analysis of 19th Century MNZE and PNZE is in agreement with virtually all other studies of CCR, con®rming the linguistic constraints that operate on the reduction of syllable-coda CCs in English. Second, 19th Century MNZE and PNZE show that linguistic dierences correlate with ethnicity, which ties in with CCR rates attested in other studies, such as on Vietnamese English (Wolfram, Christian and Hat®eld 1986), Indian English (Khan 1991), Appalachian English (Wolfram and Christian 1976), as well as in African American and Anglo American English (Fasold 1972;Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998). The seven varieties listed in Table 4 On the other hand, the chances for pre-vocalic CCR to increase are higher in contact situations that involve distinct languages, particularly when the substrate(s) does not have syllable-coda CCs.…”

“…Word-®nal stop deletion has been investigated in English varieties around the world, for instance in Tejano English (Bailey 1994), Appalachian English (Wolfram and Christian 1976), Philadelphia English (Guy 1980), Lumbee English (Torbert 2001), Vietnamese English (Wolfram, Christian and Hat®eld 1986), Indian English (Khan 1991), mesolectal Jamaican Creole English (Patrick 1991) and New Zealand English (Holmes and Bell 1994). Wolfram and Fasold (1974: 130) suggest an extensive list of potential candidates that may undergo reduction (see Table 1).…”

Interpreting tense in a second language

“…A wide body of research has shown that native speakers of Mandarin and Vietnamese, languages that do not morphologically encode tense and that they have great difficulty in the production of simple past tense morphology in English (Bayley 1994(Bayley , 1996Hawkins & Liszka 2003;Lardiere 1998aLardiere , 2000Lardiere , 2003Wolfram 1985;Wolfram, Christian & Hatfield 1986;Yan & Yuan Huang 2004). This difficulty has been shown to persist even at advanced levels of proficiency (Bayley 1994(Bayley , 1996Hawkins & Liszka 2003;Lardiere 1998aLardiere , 2000Lardiere , 2003.…”

Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth1

“…Although evidence for an ‘Asian American English’ akin to AAVE or Latino English has generally been inconclusive (e.g. Hanna 1997; Mendoza‐Denton and Iwai 1993; Spencer 1950; Wolfram, Christian and Hatfield 1986), this does not prevent Asian Americans from drawing on available linguistic resources to construct their identities (Bucholtz 2004). Yet borrowing linguistic resources to do identity work inevitably raises sensitive issues, particularly when speakers cross racially‐defined linguistic lines to do so.…”