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ABSTRACT
Drawing on linguistic ethnographic data analysis, this article aims to expand the Rampton’s concept of ‘language crossing’ through integrating the notion of ‘linguistic racism’ experienced by Mongolian background immigrant women in Australia. These women encounter linguistic homogeneity, discrimination, and alienation in varied ways in their daily institutional and non-institutional settings based on how they speak English or their usage of heritage languages. As a result, they establish everyday linguistic resistance strategies to combat linguistic racism, which further add two new dimensions to the concept of language crossing – ‘crossing as a resistance strategy’ and ‘crossing as a passing strategy’. Adopting these crossing strategies allow these women to use their preferred forms of communication to resist dominant linguistic norms and standards in the dominant culture. These strategies further make it possible for these speakers to pass as the native speakers of that dominant language. Finally, the paper argues that it is almost impossible to understand ‘language crossing’ as a discrete understanding isolated from the concept of ‘linguistic racism’. It is better to examine these concepts together, as they seem to complement each other in terms of investigating the everyday linguistic practices, sociolinguistic realities and struggles that these immigrant women encounter.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author .
Notes on contributor
Sender Dovchin received her Ph.D. from University of Technology, Sydney in 2015. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Education, Curtin University, Western Australia. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at the Centre for Language Research, University of Aizu, Japan. Her research explores the linguistic diversity of young generation, marginalized groups and immigrants in the current age of globalization. She has published her works in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, International Journal of Multilingualism, Multilingua, English Today, World Englishes, Asian Englishes, International Multilingual Research Journal, Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts and Inner Asia. Her most recent books are Popular Culture, Voice and Linguistic Diversity: Young Adults Online and Offline (2017) co-authored with Alastair Pennycook and Shaila Sultana; and Language, Media and Globalization in the Periphery: The Linguascapes of Popular Music in Mongolia (2018) published by Routledge.