Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Editors' preface
- Part 1 American English
- Part 2 Other language varieties
- 7 Multilingualism and non-English mother tongues
- 8 Creole languages: forging new identities
- 9 Native American languages
- 10 Spanish in the Northeast
- 11 Spanish in the Southwest
- 12 American Sign Language
- 13 Asian American voices: language in the Asian American community
- 14 Linguistic diversity and English language acquisition
- Part 3 The sociolinguistic situation
- Index
13 - Asian American voices: language in the Asian American community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Editors' preface
- Part 1 American English
- Part 2 Other language varieties
- 7 Multilingualism and non-English mother tongues
- 8 Creole languages: forging new identities
- 9 Native American languages
- 10 Spanish in the Northeast
- 11 Spanish in the Southwest
- 12 American Sign Language
- 13 Asian American voices: language in the Asian American community
- 14 Linguistic diversity and English language acquisition
- Part 3 The sociolinguistic situation
- Index
Summary
Editors' introduction
The USA is a nation of immigrants and the children of immigrants, most of whom did not speak English when they arrived and whose adopted English will always show traces of their ancestry. Among notable groups of recent immigrants are speakers of Asian languages, with numbers large enough to sustain ancestral languages alongside English in some American communities. Asian immigrants are not new to the USA, and in this chapter Thom Huebner and Linda Uyechi describe the struggle many have faced in learning English, including “the role of language in negotiating multiple identities across cultures and generations” and “the emotion-laden burden of coping with racism and language discrimination” in the new land of promise.
The chapter relates the history of Asian contact and immigration, from its beginnings perhaps well before Columbus to its present-day compass across the Pacific and throughout Asia. Though the term “Asian American” has become familiar, this chapter underscores the fact that “Asian American” encompasses members of a community that is “split along several dimensions: first and second waves of immigration, immigrants and refugees, Asians in Hawai'i and Asians on the mainland, different countries of origin, different generations, and different languages.” The term covers an enormously diverse “community” whose home languages are members of many language families – Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Indo- European, and Tai, in addition to Japanese and Korean, languages that are generally not recognized as having related family members. For the hugely diverse Asian American community, the authors note, “the glue that binds” is English.
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- Language in the USAThemes for the Twenty-first Century, pp. 245 - 267Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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