Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities

“This book makes a solid and sustained contribution to not only the burgeoning literature about Chinese as a global language but also our general understanding of linguistic, cultural and educational development in an increasingly multilingual world. Bringing together perspectives from an array of researchers from Asia, Europe, North America and Australia, it sheds new light on the creative and complex process whereby the Chinese language is used, taught, acquired, inherited and maintained in a wide range of socio-cultural-historical contexts. It advances our knowledge of the interaction between transnational migrations on the one hand, and language, identity, family dynamics, formal education, policy and politics on the other. It succeeds in striking a balance between rigor in research and richness in recounting.”

“This book is a very welcome antidote and corrective to recent writing and policy development in response to the rise of economic power of the People’s Republic of China that neglects the large number of geographically dispersed and socio-culturally diverse people who are the speakers of Chinese. In too many societies Chinese speakers are positioned as distant interlocutors to be encountered on foreign travel to conduct business in an admittedly very large but single socio-political entity. But Chinese is a living language of communities all across the world, one of its distinguishing features being the diaspora with its many varieties held together by common writing and some norms of origin, shared tradition and common values. In this diaspora there is also a multiplicity of socio-political realities, independent statehood, transitional autonomies of various degrees and both large and very small immigrant statuses. The authors and editors of this fine collection track the array of family socialisation patterns, complementary/heritage language schooling, diverse models of bilingualism and complex configurations of identity and culture that characterise the Sinophone world, and expand our sense of what it means to say “Chinese” and mean either people, language or culture. This is an important service to scholarship, to good teaching focused on learner needs and to new and more sophisticated language education policies adapted to the trans-national and diasporic realities of languages that have more than states behind them.”