“Tiffany Does Not Have a Solid Language Background, As She Speaks Only English”: Emerging Language Ideologies Among California Students

Abstract

Californians often take for granted a split between ethnic and linguistic identities, expecting immigrants to maintain strong ethnic identities while becoming monolingual in English. However, recent immigration has led to increasing diversity at California universities, with no majority ethnic group and many students bilingual. This study explores the language ideologies of diverse university students through an analysis of 100 essays written by undergraduates in an introductory Linguistics class. Specifically, the study asks what language ideologies are constructed when California students write about the language backgrounds of other people, and whether these ideologies appear connected to the writers' own backgrounds. Results show strong tendencies for students, regardless of ethnolinguistic background, to support home language maintenance as an index of ethnic pride and loyalty. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these results for the pedagogy of introductory Linguistics classes.

Acknowledgment

A version of this article was presented at the annual conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, Dallas, Texas, March 2013.

Notes

¹ UCD also has a rapidly increasing international population, but this was not yet true at the time I conducted this research.

² In making this comparison, it is important to note that my criteria and the census criteria were different (“outside of the classroom” is not synonymous with “at home”).

³ In taking this approach, I recognize complications with Generation 1.5 students, which would need to be sorted out if I started looking at language development issues in the essays. However, these are outside the scope of this paper.

⁴ Marin County, north of San Francisco, is stereotypically suburban, wealthy, politically liberal, and ethnically white, but also has a sizeable Latino population.

⁵ All names are pseudonyms, including Tiffany in the title of the article.

⁶ Correct spelling is güera.

⁷ The pseudo-scientific racial term “Caucasian” is often used as an ethnic term in California for people of European descent or Anglo-American heritage. It is roughly synonymous with “white” in popular discourse, but tends to be used in more formal contexts.

⁸ Twice in passages where Jason discussed his own linguistic identity, the teaching assistant inserted comments that he should be “focusing on (his) interviewees.”