Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic Variation as a Marker of Ethnic Identity in High School Setting

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

The last half century has seen a major wave of migration from Pacific Island nations to primarily English-speaking countries like the United States. This population shift, often accompanied by a shift from heritage languages to English, can lead to the development of new ethnic identities and dialects of English. Yet little is known about how Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (NHPI) teens in the U.S. construct identity. This study will investigate how NHPI teens use linguistic and other behavioral resources to construct identity in the context of U.S. public high schools. Because strong ethnic identity has been shown to improve general well-being and scholastic achievement for minority students, the results will be a valuable resource for educators and community leaders. The research will also add to the understanding of how ethnicity relates to social network and other aspects of identity, contributing to the fields of sociolinguistics and cultural anthropology. Specific research questions include: (1) To what extent do the NHPI students in the study identify with specific ethnic groups, with a panethnic Pacific Islander group, and with the local population as a whole? (2) How do the density of the NHPI population and the general level of diversity affect identity formation? (3) What linguistic and nonlinguistic practices construct and reinforce each of these identities? The study will be conducted in a metropolitan area of Utah, the state with the highest percentage of NHPIs in the contiguous U.S. It utilizes ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods in a study of NHPI and non-NHPI students in two public high schools with different ethnographic compositions. Quantitative analysis will focus on phonetic features below the level of speaker awareness, such as the pronunciation of vowels in still and steel and of final consonants in long and was. The social meaning of variation will be sought in the ethnographic work, drawing on speaker perceptions and ideologies. In addition, the study tests predictions from cultural evolutionary theory about the importance of diversity and migrant population size on the use of ethnic markers.