FOS: Zheng dissertation defense: Chinese Americans in Michigan

[Suzanne Evans Wagner]

Dear Friends of Sociolinguistics,

Next week, Mingzhe Zheng (Linguistics) will be defending his doctoral
dissertation entitled "You have to learn to adapt: A sociolinguistic study
of Chinese Americans in the 'Asian city' of southeast Michigan". An
abstract is below, and attached.

The dissertation builds on earlier work by Dennis Preston and colleagues
(some of whom are FOS on this list!) on the acquisition of local sound
change by minority ethnic groups in Michigan.

The defense is open to the public, and will take place in B-342 Wells Hall
on Tuesday, November 21st, 3pm - 5pm.

Suzanne


YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO ADAPT: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF CHINESE AMERICANS IN
THE "ASIAN CITY" OF SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN

By Mingzhe Zheng

This dissertation explores the nature of dialect contact, ethnic identity
construction by examining the extent to which the speech of second
generation Chinese Americans, born and raised in Troy, Michigan, is
affected by two local sound changes: the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), the
dominant dialect among mainstream Michiganders of European American descent
(Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006); and an emerging sound change in Michigan, the
Elsewhere Shift (Kendall & Fridland, 2014).

The community investigated in this dissertation, Troy, is in southeast
Michigan. It is distinguished by its large population of Chinese Americans
and a long residence history of Chinese immigrants compared to other Asian
groups (Metzger and Booza 2001). Referred to locally as “the Asian city of
southeast Michigan”, 19% of Troy residents are Asian and 5% self-identify
as being of Chinese descent. Job opportunities in the auto industry, a
high-quality education system, and a safe environment have been attracting
an increasing number of Chinese immigrants to this area from the 1960s and
continuing to the present day.

The acoustic and statistical analysis was carried out on the vowel system
of 30 college-age Chinese American speakers, and 15 comparable European
Americans serve as a reference group. Data collection was conducted by two
interviewers: a male graduate student from China, and a European American
undergraduate female student who was also from southeast Michigan. The data
in this study were collected by a structured interview similar to a
sociolinguistic interview.

The analyses show that Troy Chinese Americans are participating in the
local vowel system to the same degree as their European American cohort.
Nonetheless, even though the two ethnic groups share similar social
evaluation of those vowels, as indicated by the examination of contextual
style-shifting, inter-ethnic differences were nonetheless found for vowels
such as THOUGHT, DRESS, STRUT, TRAP and TOO. Inter-ethnic variation in the
realization of TOO was found to be an interlocutor effect. I argue that the
F2 dimension of TOO is used by Chinese Americans as a way to index ethnic
identity, solidarity, and localness in Troy, Michigan.

This study draws on research in variationist sociolinguistics. It joins a
growing body of work within variationist sociolinguistics that investigates
Asian American speakers in the U.S. (e.g., Hall-Lew 2009, Wong 2015, Bauman
2016). The purpose of this work is to contribute to our knowledge of the
complex interactions between language, ethnicity identity and regional
identity construction. In the variationist literature, there are a limited
number of studies focusing on stylistic variation that signals response to
interlocutor ethnicity (e.g., Rickford and McNair-Knox 1994 for African
American English). This study serves as the first step towards
investigating the stylistic variation of CAs’ English – grounded in the
variationist approach to ethnic minority English in the U.S. – and to
enrich our understanding of intra-speaker and inter-speaker stylistic
variation.
-- 
Suzanne Evans Wagner
Associate Professor of Linguistics
B-401 Wells Hall
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824

Tel: +1 (517) 355-9739
http://www.msu.edu/~wagnersu
sociolinguistics.linglang.msu.edu

Office hours: http://swagner.youcanbook.me

Associate editor, Linguistics Vanguard
<http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lingvan>
Co-editor, *Routledge Studies in Language Change
<http://www.routledge.com/books/series/RSLC/>*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/public/fos/attachments/20171115/53452aa5/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Dissertation Abstract_Mingzhe Zheng.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 268398 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/public/fos/attachments/20171115/53452aa5/attachment-0001.pdf>