Competition and Compromise of Chineses in a globalizing City: An Emerging Common LA Chinese

As the intra-ethnic lingua franca in different overseas Chinese communities, Mandarin has become practically indispensable for any Chinese throughout the world. There has been a considerable amount of research on the dynamic relationship and the changing hierarchies between Mandarin and Chinese dialects. Little attention, however, is paid to the situation of marginalized Chinese dialects. In LA Chinese diaspora, Cantonese and Taiwan Mandarin are still popular at least in certain domains, mainly because they are the mother tongues of the majority of early Chinese immigrants. The present study attempts to probe into the multilingual and multidialectal practices that LA Chinese Americans engage in to create social meaning and the process in which they employ locally meaningful linguistic resources to shape and reshape their ethnic identity. In doing so, I hope to provide an all-dimensional description of the sociolinguistic reality of the use of Chinese language in LA Chinese diasporic community.

By conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I collect data for the four empirical studies which cover four different domains of the sociolinguistic context in LA diaspora. Observations, interviews, linguistic landscaping and questionnaires are among the main research methods. The four empirical studies deal with the linguistic landscape of LA Chinatowns, the migration trajectories of Chinatown inhabitants, the teaching and learning of Chinese language in local Chinese schools, and the written and spoken Chinese represented in the local Chinese language media.

The results show that marginalized Chinese dialects and varieties, Cantonese and Taiwan Mandarin in particular, are not entirely dying out. Features from them have been absorbed by the broad sociolinguistic repertoire of Chinese inhabitants and acquired new indexicalities.
Overall, the paper argues that Mandarin spoken in LA is different from what is spoken in mainland China and in other parts of the world, because it has taken on dialectal features which survived in the competition against mainland Putonghua, and are made use of to signal the specialty of Chinese language in a diaspora setting.