The Ecology of the Chinese Language in the United States
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THE ECOLOGY OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES
INTRODUCTION
Increasingly, leaders across public and private sectors are recognizing the rise of Asia as one of the central facts of the twenty-first century. Fundamental to this shift is China’s tremendous economic growth and emergence as a social and political leader in the region. Responding to these changes, the educational system in the USA is scrambling to increase the number of American students who can demonstrate a functional proficiency in Chinese (Asia Society, 2005). The same task, only a few decades ago, would have been inconceivable. What are the factors that affect the prestige, desirability, and marketability of a language other than English? In order to answer this question, this chapter takes an ecological perspective by examining the Chinese case in the USA. As a nation of immigrants, the USA has been caught in the ideological struggle about languages between unum (assimilationist) and pluribus (pluralist), which is symbolized in the motto of the nation, E pluribus Unum (“out of many, one”) (Lo Bianco, 2001). The ecology of the Chinese language has also evolved as it responds to the waxing and waning of public discourses and language policies in the US context. Building on the themes synthesized in Hornberger’s language ecological framework (2003) and my own work (Wang, 2004), this chapter reports on Chinese immigrants and their languages in the USA. It is important to note that all varieties of Chinese spoken by Chinese people dispersed from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other South-East Asian countries, or in other parts of the world are referred to in this discussion. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Chinese Immigrants and their Languages in the USA (Evolution) Complicating the ideological struggle is the fact that different languages are placed in different hierarchical orders of need and importance based on their real or perceived economic, political, and socio-historical– cultural relationships with the USA and the world. Russian stands out A. Creese, P. Martin and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 9: Ecology of Language, 169–180. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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as a good example (Brecht with Caemmerer and Walton, 1995). The historical account of the status and positioning of Chinese speakers inside and outside the USA also illustrates this equation. As early as the Revolutionary War, the first wave of Chinese settlers began to arrive. With the exception of a few wealthy merchants and students who were allowed to bring their families, most settlers were uneducated laborers from villages in southeastern China searching for work on the plantations in Hawaii and then in farms in California (Takaki, 1989; Tuan, 1998). These laborers, who looked and dressed distinctively different from other groups of settlers, came without families and were willing to work hard for longer hours and for lower wages. They stirred racial hysteria among whit
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