Unintended language maintenance: the English Congregation of a Baptist Chinese church in Western Canada
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Huamei Han
Abstract
Based on a seventeen-month ethnography in a Baptist Chinese church in Western Canada, this article examines how the establishment of an English congregation for youth in response to language shift in fact facilitated minority language maintenance. Drawing on two ideologies of bi-/multilingualism, I illustrate that, even though perceived as “the second generation who don't understand Chinese”, young members were multilinguals with varying degrees of dominance and fluency in Chinese. I further argue that the English Congregation constituted an important space for the socialization of youth with peers and/or adults where Chinese could be used and thus learned, although engagement with the language might differ between individuals and indeed across various stages of their lives. Implications for language maintenance research are discussed.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Introduction
- Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in diversity
- Rural-urban and south-north migrations and language maintenance and shift
- Xhosa in town (revisited) – space, place and language
- Maintenance, identity and social inclusion narratives of an Afrikaans speaker living in New Zealand
- Unintended language maintenance: the English Congregation of a Baptist Chinese church in Western Canada
- Reconstructing heritage language: resolving dilemmas in language maintenance for Sri Lankan Tamil migrants
- “Foreign workers” in Singapore: conflicting discourses, language politics and the negotiation of immigrant identities
- Book Review
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Introduction
- Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in diversity
- Rural-urban and south-north migrations and language maintenance and shift
- Xhosa in town (revisited) – space, place and language
- Maintenance, identity and social inclusion narratives of an Afrikaans speaker living in New Zealand
- Unintended language maintenance: the English Congregation of a Baptist Chinese church in Western Canada
- Reconstructing heritage language: resolving dilemmas in language maintenance for Sri Lankan Tamil migrants
- “Foreign workers” in Singapore: conflicting discourses, language politics and the negotiation of immigrant identities
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Shifting Language Attitudes In North-West Amazonia
