Doctoral Dissertation Research: Chinese Nationals Among "Overseas Chinese" in Singapore: The Sociolinguistics of Multiple Linguistic Identities

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of Drs. Keith Walters and Qing Zhang, Ms. Er-Xin Lee will conduct fieldwork research for her dissertation. She will study the linguistic practices of professional workers from the People's Republic of China (also referred to as Mainland China or China) who are living in multiethnic Singapore, where an established community of Singaporean-born Chinese predominates. She will examine the extent to which the Chinese nationals use the language resources associated with Singapore, that is, Singaporean English and Mandarin, to index multiple identities within the Singaporean society and within a broader transnational Chinese context. Besides examining patterns of language mixing, she will also study patterns in the use of specific phonological and lexical features across a range of styles and social contexts, as well as discursive data comprising speakers' ideologies regarding language and identity. Lee will combine ethnographic observations of speakers' language behaviors across a range of situations and contexts with metalinguistic data recorded from participants' self-recordings and from one-on-one and group interviews. This project contributes to an understanding within linguistics and linguistic anthropology of how patterns of language use can be linked to multiple layers of identity, specifically where the forces of influence are both local and transnational. On a larger scale, the project also contributes to a growing interest among anthropologists, economists, and sociologists in studying the ways in which new migration patterns have allowed strong economic, cultural and emotional ties to be maintained between migrants and their sending countries.