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Book Release of "Creating Belonging in San Francisco Chinatown's Diasporic Community" by Adina Staicov

This book presents a much-needed discussion on ethnic identification and morphosyntactic variation in San Francisco Chinatown—a community that has received very little attention in linguistic research. An investigation of original, interactive speech data sheds light on how first- and second-generation Chinese Americans signal (ethnic) identity through morphosyntactic variation in English and on how they co-construct identity discursively. After an introduction to the community’s history, the book provides background information on ethnic varieties in North America. This discussion grounds the present book within existing research and illustrates how studies on ethnic varieties of English have evolved. The book then proceeds with a description of quantitative and qualitative results on linguistic variation and ethnic identity. These analyses show how linguistic variation is only one way of signalling belonging to a community and highlight that Chinese Americans draw on a variety of sources, most notably the heritage language, to construct and negotiate (ethnic) identity.

This research was conducted at the University of Zurich and was partially funded by the Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich, grant no. 56420402.

Staicov, A. 2020. Creating Belonging in San Francisco Chinatown's Diasporic Community: Morphosyntactic Aspects of Indexing Ethnic Identity. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-030-24992-2. DOI: 978-3-030-24993-9.

Contact information

Profile of Adina Staicov

Adina Staicov
Assistant Professor, Writing Center
Hiroshima University

Email: astaic01*hiroshima-u.ac.jp (please replace * with @)


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