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This book explores language maintenance and development in the linguistic lives of second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants as they navigate migration and diaspora, highlighting the role of women in acting as custodians and gate-keepers of family languages towards creating a sense of home.
The volume features an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on work from narrative, storytelling, literary studies, and linguistic anthropology, as well as interviews with multiple generations of immigrant families, to reflect on the ways these families foster a sense of home and maintain connections to their homelands through language. Robinson showcases the voices of a diverse range of families to examine the choices women in immigrant families make between the use of family languages, dominant community languages, or a mix of the two. The volume enhances our understanding of the ways in which immigrants navigate the linguistic landscapes of home and community amid migration and diaspora.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, language and gender, and language and migration.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction: Language, Diaspora, Home; 2. Basement Methodologies: Methods and Motivations; 3. Language in Motion: Mothers, Children, and Linguistic Circulation; 4. “Mending that Wound”: Creating Linguistic Futures in a Diasporic Space; 5. Listen to Your Mother: Home, Migration, and Language; 6. “Particularized Worlds”: Translingual Writing as Borderland Space; 7. “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”: Disidentification and Memory in the Poetry of Esther Phillips; 8. A flat White and a Banh Mi: Third Spaces, Gender, and Language in the Suburban City; 9. Island Homes; Conclusion; Index
About the author
Heather Robinson is Professor of English at York College/City University of New York. She is the lead co-author of Translingual Identities and Transnational Realities in the U.S. College Classroom (Routledge, 2020) as well as various journal articles and book chapters that have appeared in such varied venues such as Women’s Writing, American Speech, Administrative Theory and Praxis, and Creole Composition: Academic Writing and Rhetoric in the Anglophone Caribbean (2019).
Summary
Language, Diaspora, and Home explores language maintenance and development in the linguistic lives of second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants as they navigate migration and diaspora, highlighting the role of women in acting as custodians and gatekeepers of family languages toward creating a sense of “home.”
