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The Palei and the City: Language Endangerment and Socialization in the Context of Vietnam’s Rural–Urban Migrations
Studies of language endangerment have demonstrated how processes of urbanization and rural to urban migration have negatively affected the survival of the world’s endangered languages. Cham has been spoken in the south-central region of Vietnam since the 2nd Century but is spoken by only 0.1% of the Vietnamese population today. As young people move away from the palei (village) into Ho Chi Minh City, they are presented with new sociolinguistic environments where they must position themselves in relation to their heritage language and the various other linguistic codes they encounter. Drawing from ethnographic observations of folk-heritage classrooms, community events, and homes, the present research examines how young people are socialized into the use of their community’s communicative traditions as they migrate to urban environments and become “temporary” residents of the city. These practices reflect a socio-historically specific linguistic marketplace in Ho Chi Minh City that comprises wide-ranging levels of Cham-language proficiency, as well as divergent language ideologies that are (re)produced and transformed in everyday urban encounters. Through an investigation of both informal and institutionally organized interactions, this study analyzes how young people use new and sometimes contradictory opportunities during migration for the acquisition of their endangered language, and what this suggests for how they imagine urban-rural spaces in the process.
Dave Paulson is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Temple University. His enduring research interests are committed to understanding the complex intersections of language endangerment, cultural socialization, and transformations to the (broadly conceived) material world. His doctoral-dissertation research has been supported at different stages by the Temple Global Studies Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program in Vietnam, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. Before coming to Temple, Dave conducted undergraduate studies at Southern Connecticut State University in Anthropology, with minors in Asian Studies and Psychology, as well as Master’s Studies in Bilingual, Multicultural Education & TESOL. At Temple University, Dave helped to establish the Visual Anthropology Society at Temple (VAST) and has been a Research Fellow at Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture, and Society at Temple University since 2011.
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