Lauren Hall-Lew

Local authenticity and non-native Englishes

San Francisco, California has always had an eclectic demography and a diverse linguistic landscape, such that there has never been a singularly recognized variety of ‘San Francisco English’. Instead, the city was marked by tight connections between neighborhood identities, ethnic identities, and the linguistic variety associated with those very localized communities. Over time, some of these neighborhood-based identities have disappeared, while others gradually expanded beyond their original borders, in part though emerging indexical links between ethnic identities and local authenticity. The Mission District, for example, was originally associated with Irish Catholic identity and a variety of English known as the ‘Mission Twang’. This gradually became associated with San Francisco more generally as those speakers moved out of the Mission into other neighborhoods (Hall-Lew, under review). In this talk I will explore the possibility that the same process of indexical expansion from neighborhood-based identity to city-based identity is happening for San Francisco Chinatown English. While this suggests a radical shift in the symbolic value of American Chinatowns (Light 1974), Asian heritage communities have had an enduring influence in San Francisco, and many Asian, and specifically Chinese, cultural practices have become increasingly linked to local identity in the Bay Area (Hall-Lew & Starr 2010). As a result, ‘San Francisco English’ today may be best characterized as having multiple target varieties: at minimum, the Mission Twang and Chinatown English. Both enregistered varieties are linked to social personae (Agha 2003), which are crucially both ‘authentically San Franciscan’. Consequently, speakers can index particular authenticities through the use of different linguistic styles and even different variants of the same variable (Hall-Lew 2009). Despite the association between Chinatown English a non-native speech, San Francisco’s particular sociocultural history has allowed for the emergence of indexical relations between Chinese-influenced phonetic variation and local authenticity.

References

Agha, Asif. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication, 23: 231-273.

Hall-Lew, Lauren. under review. “I went to school back East… in Berkeley”: San Francisco English and Changes in Authenticity. In H. Samy Alim, Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, Mary Bucholtz, and Dolores Ines Casillas, eds. Vox California: Cultural Meanings of Linguistic Diversity.

Hall-Lew, Lauren and Rebecca L. Starr. 2010. Beyond the 2nd Generation: English use among Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a special issue on the “Social and Linguistic State of 2nd Generation Americans,” English Today, 26(3): 12-19.

Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2009. Ethnicity and Phonetic Variation in a San Francisco Neighborhood. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Light, Ivan. 1974. From Vice District to Tourist Attraction: The Moral Career of American Chinatowns, 1880-1940. The Pacific Historical Review, 43(3): 367-394.