Three Generations, Two Languages, One Family: Language Choice and Language Shift in a Chinese Community in Britain

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Multilingual Matters, 1994 - Foreign Language Study - 221 pages
This book offers a sociolinguistic study of the Chinese community in Britain. It focuses on generational changes in language choice and code-switching patterns of Chinese immigrant families. The social network model developed in the study is intended to account for the relationship between community norms of language use and conversational strategies of individual speakers, and for the relation of both to the broader social, economic and political context.
 

Contents

Chinese Communities in Britain
37
Participant Observation in a Chinese Community
68
Patterns of Language Choice and Language Shift
88
Social Networks and Variations in Language Choice
117
Conversational Codeswitching
151
Summary and Conclusion
179
Information on the Speaker Sample
188
Social Network Scores
199
References
205
Index
219
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