Return migration, multilingual practices, and new flexible identities in Hong Kong

Abstract

Transnationality research has emerged in the past 20 years in cultural anthropology, population studies, economics, social and cultural geography. Research in sociolinguistics, however, has produced little on this subject, yet a sociolinguistic approach can provide unique insights into the micro social relations of these people in transition and complement the often quantitative approaches to transnationalism and globalization. Ong (1999) exposes needs for observing the environs concerning transnationals, arguing that if “we pay attention to the transnational practices and imaginings of the nomadic subject and the social conditions that enable his flexibility, we obtain a different picture of how nation states articulate with capitalism in late modernity”. Chinese who migrate from their original homeland to the West no longer always settle permanently in their host countries. Instead, a growing number of Chinese emigrants have become a “moving population”. Once they have acquired foreign citizenship, many return to their original homeland to seek better economic and social opportunities. In 2000 the Hong Kong census and statistics department reported that 118, 400 people in Hong Kong are return migrants who hold dual nationalities. With this new trend in mobility and flexibility in citizenship in Hong Kong, there have been studies done in population research and the social geography of returnees (Ley and Kobayashi 2005, Sussman 2005, Waters 2005, 2007, 2008; Salaff et al. 2010) and China (Ip 2006), but little has been done in linguistics/sociolinguistics except the researcher’s previous research on returnees’ linguistic practices and ideologies (Chen 2008, 2015). This research takes a multi-methodological approach to return migration by incorporating current cultural anthropological theories on transnationalism and mobilities, sociolinguistic analysis of multilingualism, and theories of language ideologies and identities. Examples from the Multilingual Hong Kong Corpus (data collected by the researcher from 2002 to 2016) will be presented to reveal sociolinguistic insights of these returnee multilingual practices as compare to their local counterparts. The paper will further examine the transnational practices of individuals and the condition (or lack of) that enable their mobilities both in physical and symbolic/social levels, and how these practices can be understood in times of sweeping sociopolitical changes with evolving relationship between individuals and the nation states. References: Chen, Katherine HY (2008) “Positioning and Repositioning: Identity Negotiation of Overseas Returning Bilinguals in Hong Kong” Special issue 'Accomplishing Identity in Bilingual Interaction' Multilingua. Volume 27, Issue 1-2, pp. 57-75. Walter de Gruyter and Co. Chen, Katherine HY (2015) “Styling bilinguals: Analyzing structurally distinctive code-switching styles in Hong Kong” In Gerald Stell and Kofi Yakpo (eds.) Code-switching at the crossroads between structural and socio-linguistic perspectives. pp.163-183. Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. Ip, Manying (2006) Returnees and Transnationals: Evolving Identities of Chinese (PRC) Immigrants in New Zealand, in Journal of Population Studies. No. 33, December (2006), pp. 61-102 Ley, David and Audery Kobayashi (2005) Back to Hong Kong: return migration or transnational sojourn? Global Networks 5, 2, pp.111–127 Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality. US: Duke University Press Salaff, Janet W., Wong Siu-lun, and Arent Greve (2010) Hong Kong Movers and Stayers. The University of Illinois Press. Sussman, Nan M. (2005) Out and Back: The Movement of Hong Kongers 1984-2004 and the Psychological Consequences for Identity. Paper presented at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology conference on People on the move: the transnational flow of Chinese human capital. Sussman, Nan M. (2010) Return Migration and Identity: A Global Phenomenon, A Hong Kong Case. Hong Kong University Press Waters, Johanna L. (2005) Transnational family strategies and education in the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Global Networks 5, 4. pp. 359–377. Waters, Johanna L. (2007) ‘Roundabout routes and sanctuary schools’: the role of situated educational practices and habitus in the creation of transnational professionals. Global Networks 7, 4. pp. 477–497 Waters, Johanna L. (2008) Education, Migration, and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspora: Transnational students between Hong Kong and Canada. Cambria Press.