Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2021

The Chinese are one of the earliest established immigrant communities in the Netherlands and they are part of the new ‘superdiversity’ of metropolitan societies around the world, where the relative clarity of previous migration patterns is overlaid by vastly more complex, multilayered and less stable trajectories of movement. Understanding globalization as superdiversity (i.e. as a diversification of diversity instead of a homogenization of global culture in local language and culture practices), this paper aims to disentangle the complexities of being and knowing Chinese in the Netherlands, with respect to internal diversities within Chineseness and its relation to changing Chinese language ideologies.

The empirical starting point for this contribution is an ethnographic project among young people of Chinese heritage living in the Netherlands in and around the setting of a complementary Chinese language school in the city of Eindhoven. The paper focuses on the polycentricity of Chinese, the transformations that occur in the linguistic culinary landscape and the discursive identity construction of Chinese-Dutch youth. Using a multi-site ethnographic methodology data are collected through structured observations, interviews with Chinese community members, linguistic landscaping and online ethnography.

Overall, the paper argues that an ongoing shift along with demographic, economic and political changes in China has altered migration patterns, language ideologies and linguistic landscapes in the Chinese diaspora in the Netherlands. Young people of Chinese heritage articulate a whole repertoire of inhabited and ascribed identities, and they do so by means of a complex display and deployment of the ensemble of linguistic and communicative resources at their disposal.

Maintaining heritage languages is of vital significance for multicultural families. We present a study of Mandarin transmission among ten Dutch Chinese families in Groningen (Netherlands) associated to a local Saturday school. Data from semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire reveal that personal, integrative, and instrumental values, all play a role in language choices. Remarkably, with general positive attitudes towards multilingualism in Dutch society, families too feel encouraged to maintain Mandarin. Nevertheless, they report lack of school and institutional support, and criticisms about their ability to belong in Dutch society. Parents wish that teachers attached more importance to their heritage languages, rather than solely focusing on children’s learning of Dutch (and English), and that their own multiculturality (not only that of their children) be embraced. Likewise, parents are critical of the Chinese school, and wish teachers better accommodated to the sensitivities and practices their children are used to from their Dutch school experience.

This study explores the transmission of Japanese in Japanese-Catalan/Spanish speaking families in Catalonia from the perspective of Family Language Policy. Based on the data obtained through in-depth interviews with nine Japanese-speaking parents whose spouses are Catalan native speakers, we describe these families’ language policies in terms of how they shed light on how parents cope with transmitting Japanese in such contexts. One of the most striking findings of this study is that socially weaker languages – namely Japanese and Catalan – have an important presence in most of the participants’ families despite the use of Spanish between the parents in their home. The result of our analysis also suggests that parental beliefs and attitudes have a significant influence on their language practice and the maintenance of the heritage language (HL) at home.

Following a critical sociolinguistics approach to language maintenance in the diaspora, this paper investigates interplaying linguistic identities and ideologies towards home and host languages among four case-study Pakistanis living in Catalonia, a Catalan/Spanish-speaking European society. By drawing on fieldnotes, interviews, naturally-occurring conversations and visual materials gathered in a Barcelona call shop, it shows how informants invest in Spanish as the ‘integration’ language, despite being categorised as ‘deficient’ users of it. They present themselves as ‘native’ speakers of Urdu, which indexes modern ‘Muslimness’ and ‘Pakistaniness’, while Punjabi users, associated with the ‘yokels’, are silenced. English is ambivalently taken-up as an intra-group sign of educational status and political power and as an anti-Muslim ‘coloniser’ language. Overall, these stratifying sociolinguistic behaviours reveal how Pakistanis’ home/host multilingual resources get re-ideologised through linguistic hierarchisations which foster the maintenance of majority languages only, dismissing minority language speakers, in unchartered transnational contexts where these are already ‘delanguaged’.

This paper investigates how ideological orientations shape the programmes and curriculum of Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) schools in England as well as teachers’ practices and attitudes in response to social diversity in such settings. This paper is a result of a linguistic ethnography which explores subjective perspectives constructed locally by people in JHL schools. Japanese communities overseas tend to be regarded as homogenous. However, in the contemporary world of mobility, connectivity and diversity they exhibit heterogeneity. This paper argues that JHL schools emerged as a response to educational needs arising from heterogeneity amongst Japanese migrants and that further diversification is occurring within JHL schools. Consequently, these schools and their teachers need ways to manage diversity in the classroom. Translanguaging is examined as a strategy for inclusion and also as a positive ideological orientation towards differences.

This paper explores the reality of ‘Japanese communities’ in London and the interrelation between language and identity. First, we trace the history of the Japanese community to around the beginning of the Meiji Era (1868–1912), when Japan emerged from national isolation. We then focus on one of the ‘communities’ established around the start of the 21st century by work-related and independent relocation. We present the life stories of two women who independently resided in London and shed light on the fluid nature of language maintenance and negotiation of identities. Through the close analysis of these personal experiences, we elucidate the complex reality of individuals who may be otherwise collectively understood as members of Japanese communities. These stories highlight the heterogeneity of the Japanese individuals in London, and therefore lead us to question the discursively constructed images of the ‘Japanese communities’- and the nature and importance of ‘language maintenance’.

This article revisits the application of Social Network Analysis to the study of language maintenance and language shift in the Chinese community in Britain. An approach that focuses more on individual variations, including variable behaviours by the same speaker in different contexts, is proposed. The approach is illustrated with new data from Chinese-speaking families in London. The role of the social media in language maintenance and language shift, and in promoting multilingual practices is explored.