Schools in California have become increasingly diverse and the demographic composition of school populations has become heterogeneous in the language, nationality, and ethnicity of students. Using ethnographic and interactional analysis, the present article examines how California youth employ a variety of concepts associated with ethnicity to classify themselves and others. For youth who have peers from multiple national, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, the criteria of citizenship, national origin, language, and phenotype are negotiated interactionally for ethnic labeling. The article further suggests that ethnicity is not a simple category, but rather a concept that youth in a multiethnic context actively construct and co-construct with the help of associated notions. Finally, it is demonstrated that ethnic labeling in interviews may be a dispreferred practice for some interviewees due to its potential connection with racism and discrimination.
(2004) You know my steez: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a Black American speech community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bailey, Benjamin H
(2002) Language, race, and negotiation of identity: A study of Dominican Americans. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing. BoP
Bauman, Richard, & Charles L. Briggs
(2000) Language philosophy as language ideology: John Locke and Johann Gottfried Herder. In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 139-204.
Bucholtz, Mary
(1999) You da man: Narrating the racial other in the linguistic production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3.4: 443-460. BoP
(2006) “I guess I’m white”: Interviews, interaction, and ethnic self-classification. Paper presented at the Conference on Language, Interaction, and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, May.
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall
(2008) All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12.4:401-431.
Cutler, Cecelia A
(1999) Yorkville crossing: White teens, hip hop and African American English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3.4: 428-442.
De Fina, Anna
(2007) Code-switching and the construction of ethnic identity in a community of practice. Language in Society 36.3: 371-392. BoP
(2002) Is there “white flight” into private schools?: Evidence from the national educational longitudinal survey. The Review of Economics and Statistics 84.1: 21-33.
Fordham, Signithia
(1999) Dissin’ “the standard”: Ebonics as guerrilla warfare at Capital High. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 30.3: 272-293.
Joseph, John E
(2004) Language and identity: National, ethnic, religious. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kang, Agnes, and Adrienne Lo
(2004) Two ways of articulating heterogeneity in Korean American narratives of ethnic identity. Journal of Asian American Studies 7.2: 93-106.
Lee, Jung-Eun Janie
(2006) Representations of Asian speech in Hollywood films. Unpublished master’s thesis. University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Linguistics.
Le Page, Robert B., and Andrée Tabouret-Keller
(1982) Models and stereotypes of ethnicity and of language. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 3.3: 161-192.
McElhinny, Bonnie
(2001) See no evil, speak no evil: White police officers’ talk about race and affirmative action. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11.1: 65-78.
Mendoza-Denton, Norma
(1999) Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology of U.S. Latinos. Annual Review of Anthropology 281: 375-295.
Mendoza-Denton, Norma
(2008) Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Orfield, G., S. Schley, D. Glass, and S. Reardon
(1994) The growth of segregation in American schools: Changing patterns of separation and poverty since 1968. Equity and Excellence in Education 27.1: 5-8.
Padilla, Felix M
(1985) Latino ethnic consciousness: The case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Reyes, Angela
(2007) Language, identity, and stereotype among Southeast Asian American youth: The other Asian. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Shenk, Petra Scott
(2007) “I’m Mexican, remember?”: Constructing ethnic identities via authenticating discourse. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11.2: 194-220.
Silverstein, Michael
(2000) Whorfianism and the linguistic imagination of nationality. In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 85-138.
Tuan, Mia
(1998) Forever foreigner or honorary whites?: The Asian ethnic experiences today. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Wyman, Leisy Thornton
(2004) Language shift, youth culture, and ideology: A Yup’ik example. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford University, School of Education.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Rickert, Marie
2024. Categorisation as Positioning-Practice in a Dutch as Second Language Classroom. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 23:2 ► pp. 197 ff.
2012. Nicknames in Australian Secondary Schools: Insights into Nicknames and Adolescent Views of Self. Names 60:3 ► pp. 135 ff.
van de Weerd, Pomme
2019. “Those foreigners ruin everything here”: Interactional functions of ethnic labelling among pupils in the Netherlands. Journal of Sociolinguistics 23:3 ► pp. 244 ff.
van de Weerd, Pomme
2020. Categorization in the classroom: a comparison of teachers’ and students’ use of ethnic categories. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 15:4 ► pp. 354 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.