Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 24, Issue 2, 2014

The modern conception of the self is grounded in stability and identity. Under this perspective, anxiety and insecurity of the border are only characteristic of peripheral communities. However, anxiety and insecurity are much more fundamental to linguistic life; heterogeneity of linguistic practice and our constant movement across communities, positions, categories, and identities mean that uncertainty and indeterminacy are just as salient in the way we use language. This special issue builds upon this insight to explore the subjectivities of border crossing in contexts of language contact under globalization. By bringing together studies that explore cases of language and cultural contact across the Asia-Pacific region from the perspective of anxiety and insecurity, it aims to highlight the importance of considering subjectivity in our analysis of language in globalization, and considers the new insights we may gain through an emphasis on the subjective dimensions of contact situations. Together, the contributions to the special issue identify three key issues for further research on the sociolinguistics of globalization: (1) the role of language ideologies in mediating experiences of transnationalism, (2) consequences of globally circulated semiotic resources on local articulations of subjectivities, and (3) the impact of neoliberal projects of social transformation upon our sense of self.

Language is one of the most crucial factors which influence social experiences and relations of transnational migrants. Moreover, crossing borders becomes an important strategy for acquiring valuable linguistic resources in the globalized neoliberal economy. For instance, through jogi yuhak (Early Study Abroad), the transnational educational migration of Korean middle class families, parents aim to provide their children with the opportunities to acquire multilingual competence as important skills for them to become competitive neoliberal workers in the global economy. However, anxiety and insecurity are inherent in transnational movement in the sense that relocation necessarily implies adjustment to new conditions of life. This paper investigates the anxieties and insecurities which Korean jogi yuhak families experience during their transnational educational migration. Based on an ethnographic study on Korean educational migrant families in Singapore, it explores how uncertainty and tension serve as an unavoidable aspect of strategic migratory choices and how the fierce pursuit of neoliberal subjectivity through global mobility works to increase the anxieties of the families. Korean jogi yuhak families’ constant negotiation between conflicting expectations and options across multiple scales of Time and Space in their migratory trajectories leads to awareness of the complex relationship between language and space, resulting in increasing anxiety and insecurity.

This study investigates the construction of hybrid identity and cultural values as demonstrated by local Hawai‘i residents in the multiethnic urban community of Honolulu. Due to its unique historical background, Honolulu has become host to a variety of Pacific and East Asian ethnic and cultural communities, many of which are places wherein tattooing has been a traditional practice among the natives. Ideals of culturalized identity were espoused by tattoo wearers through discourse with the researchers. The results demonstrate that many wearers feel an interconnection or transnationalism with one or more of Hawai‘i’s constituent cultures, and often imbue tattoos with personal or cultural meaning, with the goal of displaying the semiotic ideology of their local specific identity in a Hawai‘i context.

This article examines the effect of linguistic anxiety on identity by analyzing the use of English in Japanese television from the perspective of Sociocultural Linguistics. Close analysis of segments from Japanese television entertainment programs shows how both verbal and visual intertextual resources are used to create linguistic anxiety at the micro level of personal interaction, on the macro level of government policy and television genre, and also at meso levels that exist between both the macro and micro. Semiotic resources such as costumes, set design, subtitles, and other elements in the mediascape allow for circulation of ideologies from government policies into assessments of individuals. The role of meso level discourse in the bidirectional transmission of linguistic anxiety between the macro levels of society and the micro levels of personal interaction is discussed.

Singapore’s thriving globalized economy, founded on the ideology of meritocracy and conservative aversion to welfare provision, privileges industriousness, talent and competence, which works to justify the socioeconomic peripherality of a segment of the Malay community. These Malays are encouraged to acquire entrepreneurial skills through programmes run by privatized self-help organizations to attain social mobility. But privileging of Standard English as a necessary linguistic and cultural resource in such programmes results in linguistic insecurity, and the programme participants’ attempt to use English backfires due to their limited competence in the language. The analysis in this paper focuses on the anxieties involved in the positioning strategies that Malay participants employed in interviews and interactions during a micro-business training programme. Participants’ discursive strategies of adequation and distinction (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005) show how their linguistic insecurity about English reflects the tension between the prevailing negative branding of Malays as underachievers and their resistance towards it.

This paper explores the notion of linguistic insecurity as a way of exploring the link between language ideologies and the subjective experiences of transnational workers in the new economy. Focusing on two contrasting ideologies that characterize how language and identity is understood under neoliberalism — the newer ideology which presumes a flexible link between language and identity, and the older ideology which posits an essentialist connection — I analyze how a Korean mid-level manager working at a multinational corporation in Singapore deploys these ideologies in a narrative about his experience of transnational work, and discuss how such discursive practice can be understood in terms of linguistic insecurity.

This commentary responds to papers in a special issue on “Anxiety, Insecurity, and Border Crossing: Language Contact in a Globalizing World.” The discussion considers how anxiety emerges as transnational subjects seek semiotic stability in the global economy’s shifting terrain of indexical relations. Although contact zones informed by neoliberalism valorize linguistic flexibility, they also hierarchize certain kinds of communicative competence as more flexible than others. When linguistic practice is divorced from its temporal and spatial roots, it is readily essentialized as indexical of particular kinds of personhood, only some of which are viewed as appropriately global. The ambiguity of what counts as linguistic capital in the global economy leads speakers to defend their behaviors through appeals to authenticity, often confirming the very ideology that positions them as linguistically inflexible.

Previous research has shown that differences in the speech that children are exposed to can lead to differences in their language, literacy and cognitive development, and may even affect subsequent success at school. Informed by Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of language learning in early childhood and Sigel’s Psychological Distancing Model, this ethnographic multiple-case study analyzes maternal interaction strategies in four Chinese families in Singapore — two local and two immigrant families — to explore factors that influence choice of interaction strategies. Cross-case comparisons are made in terms of the mothers’ professional and cultural backgrounds, and within-case comparisons are made along the lines of contextual factors. The comparisons reveal both important similarities and differences in the mothers’ use of interaction strategies which was shaped by an array of social, cultural, and contextual factors.

With an inter-disciplinary perspective of second language acquisition and cross-cultural adaptation, this study explores the nature of linguistically- and culturally-specific learning processes perceived by sojourners during study abroad. Methodologically, their diary entries with follow-up interviews were analyzed using the grounded theory approach. Findings included two themes that emerged as key in determining and reflecting sojourners’ learning processes in the host environment: (1) attitudes towards normative or authentic language use; and (2) perceptions of traditional or exploratory identity. Furthermore, dynamic tensions were observed between these two themes, constrained by the prescriptive knowledge and skills that sojourners had developed in formal classroom instruction and learning in the home country.