Ethnicity and Sociolinguistic Variation in San Francisco

Abstract

California’s San Francisco Bay Area has long been one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the United States, and ethnicity is an integral aspect of any research on language use in the region. This article gives a brief social history of San Francisco with respect to settlement patterns since the 1850s’ gold rush, paying particular attention to Chinese Americans, who are argued to play an especially distinctive role in the city’s history and current social landscape. This article also reviews the sociolinguistic research on language and ethnicity in and around San Francisco, with a focus on studies on variation and change in English, noting the relative lack of attention to Asian American ethnicities and calling for increased scholarship on the linguistic construction of Asian identities in the San Francisco area.

1. Introduction

California has been a ‘majority–minority’ state since at least 2000 (US Census Bureau 2000), with less than 50% of the state’s overall population identifying as ‘white’.¹ Sociolinguistic research in California has long considered ethnic variation to be an important aspect of description and analysis, particularly in studies based in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and the San Francisco Bay Area. This article gives an overview to the history of ethnic variation in San Francisco, introducing some of the ways in which San Francisco’s social history is relevant to the study of language and ethnicity, and providing an overview of research on English variation and change in the San Francisco Bay Area with respect to ethnicity.

Before focusing on San Francisco, a quick definition of terms is in order, namely, ethnicity and the relatedly contested term, race. As numerous scholars have argued (e.g., Fishman 1989; Fought 2006; Eckert 2008a; Becker & Coggshall 2009), these forms of categorization are just as socially constructed as any other categories (e.g., gender or class), and the ways in which this construction occurs will have implications for the analysis of language in a given community. Ethnic categories, which typically reflect shared aspects of identity such as cultural and religious heritage and migration history, are often conflated in American discourse with racial categories. Race, however, is problematically constructed with greater reference to perceived physical similarities such as skin color or facial features, which can vary widely within ethnic groups. That said, even the US Census refers to ethnic differences such as Race, only using the category of ethnicity to refer to persons of Hispanic or Latino heritage. Although this article relies on some ‘racial’ categories when referencing demographic sources such as the US Census, it advocates a theoretical focus on the local construction of ethnic identities and their boundaries, in other words, the ways in which ethnicity is conceived, created, and challenged by San Franciscans in their day-to-day lives (Eckert 2008a).

Understanding the social history of any community provides the analyst with access to meanings of ethnicity that go beyond mere population statistics, and sociolinguistic research in the San Francisco Bay Area offers one such example. This article gives a synopsis of ethnic variation and change throughout San Francisco’s history, and connects this to a review of the major sociolinguistic studies that have been conducted in and around the region.

In the 2000 US Census, the population of the city of San Francisco was 776,733 – small in comparison with other American cities, and only 11% of the entire San Francisco Bay Area population (6,783,760). This number has been roughly consistent since the 1950s, and reflects the geographical and political constraints on the city’s development. Sitting at the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, with water on all sides except to the south (where it is bordered by the suburbs of Daly City and South San Francisco), population changes within the city are more a consequence of demographic shift than of residential growth. One of the most striking ways that San Francisco’s social landscape has shifted overtime is with respect to ethnicity.

San Francisco’s population was over 90%‘white’ or European American from 1860 to 1950. Between 1950 and 2000, the percentage of the city that identified as ‘white’ dropped from 89 to 50%. The other half of San Francisco recorded their ethnicity on the 2000 US Census as either Asian (30.8%), Black/African American (7.8%), other (6.5%), two or more races (4.3%), American Indian/Alaska Native (0.5%), or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (0.5%), with 14.1% of San Franciscans of any race identifying as Hispanic/Latino (US Census Bureau 2000). San Francisco is comparatively diverse with respect to the dominant language spoken at home: only 54.3% of households use English primarily, whereas Asian/Pacific Island languages predominate in 26.1%, Spanish in 12%, and other Indo-European languages in 6.7% (US Census Bureau 2000).

San Francisco’s demographic distribution, alone, suggests that analyses of language use, and specifically linguistic variation and change, must consider the role of the speaker’s ethnic identity. Furthermore, although African American and Latino populations have been keys to many studies of language and ethnicity in the United States, and although both are an important part of San Francisco’s ethnic landscape, Asian ethnicities take on a particularly unique prominence. And this remains increasingly true: as the estimated percentage of San Franciscans identifying as Asian rose slightly in the 2008 population estimates (up to 31.2%), the percentage of all other non-white ethnicities fell. In this brief review of San Francisco’s settlement history, I focus on Asian American histories as particularly important for analyzing the interaction between language ethnicity in San Francisco today.

2. Ethnic Variation and Change in San Francisco

The San Francisco Bay Area has long been characterized by an ethnically diverse population. Since the time of the Ohlone majority (see Margolin 1978), the San Francisco peninsula has been colonized and occupied by Spain, England, Mexico, the Republic of California, and the United States. Since joining the United States in 1848, the gold rush, construction of the railroads, and a wide range of domestic and international industry and commerce has ensured a dynamic pattern of migration and settlement throughout the Bay Area.

Ethnically, the first gold seekers reflected the distribution of residents had been part of Spanish-speaking Mexican California prior to 1848: Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and European Americans. New domestic arrivals included European Americans and African Americans, the latter arriving mostly from the southern states. Internationally, immigrants in 1849 came from across world: South America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and Asia. The vast majority of immigrants from Asia arrived from southern China. Although San Francisco’s nineteenth-century population was dominated by European Americans (52,866 ‘white’ residents in the 1860 census, or 93% of the total population; Census 1860), the second most prominent group was the Chinese (2719 ‘Asiatic’ residents in the 1860 census, or 5% of the total). Although fewer in number, the Chinese had a more salient presence as an ethnic group, owing to their linguistic and cultural distinctiveness and by being isolated in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Whiteness and European American ethnicities in San Francisco

One of the most problematic racial categories in the United States is the label ‘white,’ which is applied to and adopted by people claiming any of a wide range of European (and mixed or multiethnic) heritages, thus erasing that vast internal ethnic diversity (Irvine and Gal 2000). Relative to other racial categories, whiteness is also ideologically unmarked and further constructed as a lack of ethnic identity (Bucholtz 1999; Fought 2006). In San Francisco, the population has a white racial plurality according to US Census Bureau (2000) figures, but this statistic fails to capture the active social construction of various European ethnicities among city residents.

One of the many ways in which European ethnic identities are sustained through social practice is through the role of religion. Although San Francisco neighborhoods have historically been associated with particular ethnicities, this association has been historically strengthened by situations of overlap with, for example, Catholic parishes. As particular Catholic churches become associated with Irish, Italian, or Mexican culture, the communities around those churches perform shared cultural practices beyond those associated with religion, creating and recreating ethnic identity. However, because of the powerful and simultaneous construction of whiteness, particularly at the national level, European Americans in San Francisco may be increasingly less likely to identify with particular ethnicities.

As with many urban centers in the United States, San Francisco is divided into neighborhoods that are often associated with residents of particular ethnicities. This association emerged in part from segregationist policies and restrictions on business and home ownership enforced between the late 1800s and World War II (see Godfrey 1988). For many San Franciscans, past and present, local identity is tied to neighborhood, and neighborhood identity is tied to ethnicity. Among San Francisco subcultures characterized by ethnicity, Chinese Americans have long been prominent, and Chinatown is a prime example of an ethnically marked neighborhood. Chinatown and its residents have been central to the city’s image and worldwide reputation, and San Francisco has likewise been central to Chinese American history more generally. Although only one part of the ethnic and linguistic variation within San Francisco, the history of Chinatown and its residents and descendants is key to understanding language and ethnicity in the city today.

2.1. Chinese Americans in San Francisco: Gold Rush to World War II

The earliest Chinese immigrants in the United States came from Guangdong Province in southern China. Coinciding with the gold rush, the Tai Ping Rebellion of 1850 drove many people to California, known as Gum Shan (Golden Mountain). During the 1860s and 1870s, Chinese immigration was actively encouraged by major railroad companies operating in California, which promised work building the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Despite certain prohibitions on Chinese immigration, San Francisco Chinatown had nearly 15,000 residents by 1882 (Yung 2006).

This first era of settlers from China founded San Francisco’s Chinatown (or Tong Yun Fow, ‘town of the Tang people’), which segregated the Chinese from the rest of the city through both internal and external pressures: social and economic convenience as well as social and economic discrimination (Yung 2006, Wang 2007). Although European immigrants traveled to San Francisco via Eastern US cities, having time and greater cultural similarities to aid in acclimating, the Chinese often came directly from China and lived only in Chinatown, accentuating their linguistic isolation, social isolation, and perceived foreignness in early San Francisco.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited further immigration of Chinese laborers and barred those in the United States from naturalization. A new phase of Chinese immigration was made possible by San Francisco’s major earthquake and fire of 1906, which resulted in the destruction of birth certificates and immigration records in City Hall, allowing Chinese San Franciscans to claim US citizenship and send for relatives in China, affecting Chinese migration to the United States as a whole.² However, the Immigration Act of 1924 included the Asian Exclusion Act and again closed off this phase of Chinese immigration.

Prior to World War II, all Chinese San Franciscans lived in Chinatown and were limited to working menial jobs and living in overcrowded, substandard housing (Yung and The Chinese Historical Society of America 2006). English was only used in the areas frequented by tourists (see DeCamp 1953:36), and Chinese was not used outside Chinatown. This state of total social and linguistic segregation in San Francisco began to break down after the end of World War II, in large part owing to changes in foreign policy and immigration legislation at the national level.

2.2. Chinese Americans in San Francisco: 1945–1965

‘World War II marked a historic watershed for San Francisco: only the Gold Rush, and arguably the earthquake and fire, had greater impacts on the cultural landscape’Godfrey (1988:11). One of the clearest examples of this is the effect of the war on US immigration policy. The US alliance with China led to repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, paving the way for more anti-Chinese laws to be revoked in the following years.³ The most important and lasting change to US immigrant legislation was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eliminated national quotas on immigration. It led to a major shift of ethnic demographics in the United States in general, across major urban centers (cf. Becker & Coggshall 2009), and particularly in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Tucker 1969; Wang 2007).

Over 90% of San Francisco Chinatown’s residents have consistently been from China or other Chinese-speaking regions in Asia. Immigrants from other Asian countries have settled in Chinatown and other parts of San Francisco, but have never been as numerous as those of Chinese descent. Although most of the early immigrants from China to the United States came from Guangdong Province, Chinese Americans today may trace their roots to one of multiple locations within mainland China, as well as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau,⁴ and any other nation or region with its own long history of Chinese immigration, such as Singapore, Korea, Canada, or Hawai’i. As a consequence, the majority Chinese variety spoken by Chinatown residents seems to have shifted over the decades. The nineteenth-century founders of Chinatown spoke varieties of southern mainland Cantonese, specifically varieties of Toisanese (i.e., Taishanese), although later settlers have been relatively more likely to speak varieties of Mandarin. This shift is occurring in Chinatowns across the United States, such as New York, Boston, and Chicago, as immigration patterns change at a global level (see Sacchetti 2009; Semple 2009). Dong and Hom (1980) argued that a dominant Chinatown Chinese variety existed in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early 1980s, based in Toisanese, which all new immigrants oriented to regardless of their native variety. The newcomers, however, clearly shape that variety, so that ‘the Chinese Chinatown variety is forever in flux’ (Dong and Hom 1980:3). One complicating factor is the increased use of Hong Kong Cantonese in Chinatown since the Chinese reunification of Hong Kong in 1997, a variety that differs markedly both from Mandarin and Toisanese.

2.3. Chinese Americans in San Francisco: since 1965

San Francisco Chinatown’s social and linguistic restructuring was aided by the upward mobility of pre-1965 residents out of the substandard housing and into more affluent areas. By the 1960s, non-whites were free to find better jobs, marry outside their ethnic group, own land and property, and to live outside their home neighborhoods (Yung and The Chinese Historical Society of America 2006). As these San Franciscans began moving into the city’s newer residential neighborhoods, the relationship between socioeconomic class and ethnicity in San Francisco became more complex, impacting linguistic markets as well. Chinatown grew in parallel with new, multiethnic middle-class neighborhoods characterized as New Chinatowns (districts in the western part of the city; see Laguerre 2005; Fong 2008; Hall-Lew 2009), with immigrants moving into all three neighborhoods. This led to stratification according to socioeconomic status within the Asian San Franciscan community, contrasting run-down housing in old Chinatown with the new single-family homes of the western districts (and suburbs; see Cheng 2006). There are two major consequences of this social history for understanding language and ethnicity in San Francisco: one for working class areas, like Chinatown, and the other for relatively wealthier areas, like the western districts. On one hand, the continual repopulation of Chinatown by newer immigrants from Asia means that one of the oldest San Francisco neighborhoods may still be seen as ‘foreign’, rather than being seen as ‘native’ as some of the other communities and neighborhoods throughout the city which are predominantly European American.

On the other hand, given San Francisco’s role as the primary point of entry to the mainland United States for Chinese migrants for about 160 years, Chinese Americans today do not necessarily occupy a marginalized position in the city as they do in many US cities outside the Bay Area. Instead, many Chinese Americans today can claim a San Francisco native authenticity that goes back in history just as far as that of their European American counterparts. In many neighborhoods, a Chinese plurality is the norm for schools, businesses, and other community spaces, and boundaries between Chinese and other ethnic practices are blurred (see Figures 1 and 2). Recent ethnographic research among residents in one of the newer western districts reveals that San Franciscans recognize that ways of being Chinese American are tremendously diverse, a fact that challenges any monolithic representation as an ethnic ‘other’ (Hall-Lew 2009). Although sentiments certainly persist which continue to essentialize and stigmatize Chinese ethnicity, the younger generation of non-Chinese San Franciscans can also increasingly participate in social practices linked to Chinese and other Asian ethnicities. This has important consequences for understanding San Franciscans’ construction self, particularly in relation to language and ethnicity; linguistic variation that indexes ethnicity may be more widely available as a resource for constructing other local identities and personae, regardless of speaker ethnicity. The normalcy and ubiquity of pan-Chinese linguistic and cultural practices also affects the ways in which Asian American and ‘pan-Asian’ identities become constructed in San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay Area, at times in concert with those Chinese practices, and other times in opposition to them.

Figure 1.  The schedule of mass at a traditionally Irish American Catholic Church in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District, now offering a Chinese Mass.

Figure 2.  El Chico Produce Market in San Francisco’s Sunset District.

2.4. Being ‘Asian’ (American) in San Francisco

After 1965, the distribution of San Francisco’s Asian heritage population shifted: Chinese immigrants as well as Filipino and Japanese immigrants from before 1965 were joined by newer immigrants from Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, and other areas of South and Southeast Asia. The estimated population of San Francisco in 2005–2007 was 757,604, and about 31.6% of that population was identified as Asian (Census 2008). Within that group, 63.7% were identified as Chinese (20% of the total population), 15.8% as Filipino, and less than 5% each as Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, East Indian, or ‘Other Asian’ (Census 2008). Although the Asian American community is still dominated by those of Chinese heritage (in the United States as well as in the San Francisco; Barnes and Bennett 2002), other Asian experiences are vital to the ways in which ‘Asianness’ is conceived of and constructed. This is particularly true in the suburbs across the greater San Francisco Bay Area, where Asian Americans, on a whole, are an even greater percentage of the overall population than in the city of San Francisco (specifically in Daly City, Fremont, and Sunnyvale; Barnes and Bennett 2002).

The city of San Francisco has been historically central to the emergence and contestation of a national, pan-ethnic identity (see Espiritu 1992). The term ‘Asian American’ was first used in the San Francisco Bay Area to spearhead a national movement uniting people of diverse Asian heritages around common causes and interests. Although relatively understudied within linguistics, ‘Asianness’ in San Francisco offers multiple, promising sites for investigating the active negotiation of ethnic boundaries and membership rights within communities. Although the term does represent shared experiences and a certain shared identity, the diversity of its membership is just as definitive of the group as are the similarities. This diversity is, however, subject to ideological erasure in the local and national discourse (Irvine and Gal 2000). Recent work in sociolinguistics (Hall-Lew 2009) has found that San Franciscans often discursively conflate the terms ‘Asian’ and ‘Chinese’, and residents of non-Chinese, East Asian ethnicities are frequently framed as Chinese. The vast diversity internal to the category ‘Chinese’ is further erased, as is the ‘Asianness’ of people of South Asian ethnicities. These processes of erasure stem from the settlement history and population distribution of the San Francisco Bay Area, both in historical and demographic terms, and are but one way in which language and ethnicity research must look beyond population statistics and consider how ethnicity is framed within communities.

Asian heritage groups in the San Francisco Bay Area clearly differ in their cultural practices in various ways that impact studies of language. For example, one important aspect of cultural variation between Asian groups in San Francisco is the role of religion. For example, the predominance of Catholicism among Filipinos has meant that Filipino San Franciscans have shared important social spaces and cultural practices with San Franciscans of Irish and Italian descent for many generations, in ways that other Asian Americans have not. However, these historical associations are increasingly complicated by the growing diversity between Asian Americans and increasingly complex associations between ethnicity and religion (see Figure 1).

Another important aspect of variation within Asian Americans in San Francisco is the factor of immigrant generation. As new epochs of post-1965 immigration continue to join the descendants of earlier migrants, Asianness in San Francisco increasingly stratified based on immigrant generation in a way that co-varies, to a general extent, with country of origin. For example, the Chinese (American) community is characterized by new, or first-generation, immigrants as well as second, third, and higher immigrant generation Americans, whereas the Hmong (American) community, for example, is less highly stratified by immigrant generation and more characterized by a shared migration experience. Related to this, the connections between ethnic identity and expectations around bilingual fluency or heritage language use are also constructed in varying ways within and between each community (see Williams 2006).

Diversity according to immigrant generation also suggests that intermarriage between people of Asian and non-Asian heritage may be more common among some ethnic groups than others; nationally, multiracial individuals with Asian heritage are proportionally more common among Japanese, Filipino, or Chinese descendants than Korean or Vietnamese groups (Barnes and Bennett 2002). In 2000, 4.3% of San Franciscans identified as biracial or multiracial (versus 2.4% of the general US population). A multiracial individual may identify primarily as belonging to one ethnic group, multiple ethnic groups, one distinctly ‘mixed’ ethnicity, no ethnic group, or some combination, and this identification may shift over time (Bucholtz 1995). Because of Asian Americans’ prominence, multiracial San Franciscans often have some Asian heritage, and may adopt the identification of ‘Hapa’.⁵ Multiethnic identities have been understudied in language and ethnicity research (Fought 2006; but see Bucholtz 1995) yet are in many ways ideal for analyzing the role of language in the active construction of ethnicity by individual speakers.

3. Research on Language and Ethnicity in San Francisco

The first few major studies of language variation and change in San Francisco English did not focus on ethnicity as a major factor: none analyzed race or ethnicity as an independent variable, although some did include ethnic variation in their speaker sample. Furthermore, very few have considered Asian American ethnicity as a potentially important factor. This section reviews the role of ethnicity in those earlier studies, and then presents an overview of more recent work in the San Francisco Bay Area that takes speakers’ orientations toward ethnicity as central to the analysis of sociolinguistic variation.

Mexican Americans and being Chicano in San Francisco

The US Census (2000) reported that 14.1% of San Francisco’s population identified as ‘Hispanic/Latino’, the plurality of which identified as Mexican (6.3%). Mexican Americans constitute a greater percentage of San Francisco’s ethnic distribution than any Asian group, aside from Chinese Americans. Linguistically, Mexican varieties of Spanish clearly dominate the Spanish found in San Francisco, and Chicano English is a prominent local variety of English (see Mendoza-Denton 1997, 2007; Fought 2003).

San Francisco was Mexican territory before joining the United States in 1848, and Mexican American identity has been sustained through continued migration and settlement into the city and the Bay Area. Parallel to the histories of other ethnic groups, people were drawn from Mexico to San Francisco during the gold rush and during other subsequent periods of political turmoil in Mexico (such as the Mexican Revolution 1910–1917). World War II was a pivotal point in Mexican immigration, as the United States encouraged people to come fill the vacated farming jobs. Increased Mexican immigration to the Bay Area since the 1965 Immigration Act has paralleled the Chicano Civil Rights Movement across the southwestern United States and throughout California.

Although mixed or multiethnic identities among Asian Americans are constructed as a distinctly Hapa, Mexican heritage identities are in large part inherently multiethnic. Mexican Americans generally claim a mestizo identity, emergent from the history of contact between the indigenous inhabitants of western North America and Spanish colonizers in the same area in the late sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. As a national identity, ‘Mexican’ also necessarily encompasses a wide range of individuals who identify with multiple and/or differing racial categories. For these and many other reasons, Mexican American and Chicano identities have broad implications for language and ethnicity in San Francisco.

The first sociolinguistic study in San Francisco was DeCamp’s (1953) dialectological analysis that formed part of the Linguistics Atlas of the Pacific Coast (Reed and Metcalf 1979). Out of 25 speakers in the total sample, DeCamp included three speakers labeled ‘Jewish’ and three labeled ‘Negro’, one for each of three ‘educational types’ (less than high school, high school, and more than high school), the other 18 speakers labeled ‘white’. Rather than comprising a sample that was statistically representative of the population’s ethnic distribution, DeCamp included these speakers in the linguistic atlas tradition, which approximated representativeness through the inclusion of token speakers. Based on this sample, and the analysis of a wide range of linguistic variables typical of linguistic atlas work of the time (e.g., the entire vowel system, the entire consonant system, and several morphosyntactic features), DeCamp noted a linguistic pattern in line with the migration trends of the time, namely, that the African American speakers were more likely to exhibit speech patterns similar to the South or South Midland dialect areas, in contrast to the European American (and Jewish) speakers, who displayed patterns of linguistic production that better approximated northern dialects. DeCamp’s study was conducted after the end of World War II, but prior to any major change in San Francisco’s ethnic distribution, and his speaker sample, in part, reflects this. For example, Chinese Americans were not included in DeCamp’s study, which was a descriptive account of English dialect variation, because despite generations of residency in the United States, many of Chinese San Franciscans would not have been English dominant. Although only including participants who were native to the city of San Francisco, DeCamp’s analysis sought to draw connections between particular speakers’ pronunciations and dialect areas to the East, rather than to describe particularly Californian or San Franciscan ways of speaking.

The second variationist study of San Francisco English by Hinton et al. (1987), 35 years after DeCamp (1953), focused on recruiting young speakers from across the Bay Area, in an effort to analyze the most advanced forms of new sound changes they were observing across California and in popular, California-based media: the fronting of the goat and goose vowels (where those vowels are pronounced with the tongue body further front in the mouth), the lowering of the kit and dress vowels (where the tongue body is lower), the lowering and backing of the trap vowel, and the merger of the lot and thought vowels (where those vowels are pronounced in the same way).⁶ As a result, their analysis focused more on speakers’ age as a relevant sociolinguistic variable, rather than speakers’ ethnicity. The non-white participants who appeared in their final sample consisted of four African Americans, two Asian Americans (where ‘Asian’ was not specified, although one of the two was of Singaporean descent), and one Latina, out of 22 total speakers (so, in combination with 15 white speakers). Hinton et al. (1987), found that, overall, the two Asian Americans matched the vowel production patterns of the 15 European Americans, whereas the other five speakers of color were discussed as not producing these sound changes, with production patterns more similar to the older white speakers than the white speakers of their same age cohort. That said, the data (unsurprisingly) show quite a bit of variation between the individual speakers, and the numbers are simply too small to make any conclusions from this study with respect to ethnicity. At the time of the study, in the mid-1980s, demographic shift in San Francisco with respect to ethnicity was proceeding rapidly, and adequate coverage of ethnic variation with respect to linguistic variation would have been a herculean task.

The third analysis of San Francisco English, by Moonwomon (1992), focused specifically on the low vowel system, analyzing phonetic shift in the vowels of trap, lot, and thought. This study, however, eliminated ethnicity as part of the analysis through its methodological design. By confining her speaker sample to white women, Moonwomon investigated research questions particularly relevant to that demographic, considering variation in socioeconomic class as it is realized between speakers of comparable sex and ethnicity. At the same time, Moonwomon’s choice to define her participant sample in this way implied that ethnic variation (and gender or sex variation as well) has such a potentially strong impact on the analysis of San Francisco English that it was beyond the scope of her study. Her analysis did confirm that the sound changes found among younger speakers in the Hinton et al. (1987) study (of which she was a part) were in progress within this sample, specifically that trap was raising and fronting before nasals, lowering and backing elsewhere, and that lot and thought were moving toward merger. Furthermore, Moonwomon found differences between middle-class and working class women with respect to attitudes toward ethnic shift in San Francisco, with some of the working class participants expressing greater resistance to the increased Asian and specifically Chinese presence in their neighborhood. However, Moonwomon did not draw specific connections between the low vowel production patterns of these women and their orientations toward ethnicity, although she did find more advanced (i.e., more raised before nasals) productions of the trap vowel for the middle-class speakers. As Bucholtz’ (2007, inter alia) work in a Bay Area high school suggests, discourse about race often stands in for discourse about class, and analyses of class ideologies in the San Francisco area are inseparable from the local construction of ethnicity, particularly since the early 1990s.

Linguistic research across the San Francisco Bay Area, outside the city itself, has been much more actively engaged in investigating the role of ethnicity and ethnic identities, particularly since the 1990s. Rickford (1992, inter alia) analyzed morphosyntactic variation among African Americans from East Palo Alto, comparing usage patterns of several variables across three age groups, and contrasting the results with those found in studies among African Americans in other parts of the United States. Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994) and Alim (2004) have also analyzed style-shifting with respect to morphosyntactic variation in African American English in the Bay Area, joining a larger canon of research on language and ethnicity that argues for the crucial role of an interlocutor’s race and ethnic identity in affecting patterns of linguistic production. With respect to African American English, in particular, the role of ethnicity in linguistic production in the San Francisco Bay Area became a national media firestorm in 1996 with the passing of the Oakland School Board ‘Ebonics’ resolution and the resulting media controversy, an event addressed by Rickford (1997) and Rickford and Rickford (2000), among others.

Bucholtz’s (1999, 2001, 2004, 2007) work in another part of the Bay Area analyzed the role of language in identity construction among students at an ethnically diverse high school. She found that several linguistic variables, often considered to be features of African American English (including various phonological, syntactic, lexical, and discourse features), were employed by whites (Bucholtz 1999) and South Asian Americans (Bucholtz 2004) in the construction of their own ethnic identities, and were specifically avoided by others in the construction of other, for example, ‘nerd’, identities (Bucholtz 2001). The nerd identity, in particular, was in turn represented as ‘hyperwhite’ through the employment of linguistic resources marked as ‘superstandard’ (e.g., ‘lexical formality, carefully articulated phonological forms, and prescriptively standard grammar’; Bucholtz 2001:88). Bucholtz’s work is perfectly situated in the ethnic landscape of the present-day San Francisco Bay Area, in that it highlights the fluid construction of ethnic meaning, which, although rooted in a speaker’s ethnic identity, is highly negotiated in a community through linguistic and other social practices.

Similarly, Shankar’s (2008) analysis of South Asian American teens in Silicon Valley (located directly south of San Francisco) argues for the creation of ethnically marked, ‘FOB styles’ comprised of linguistic features from ‘Punjabi, Desi Accented English, California slang, and hip-hop lexicon’ (268). These linguistic styles encode ethnic identity and socioeconomic class membership, and Shankar argues that middle-class, Silicon Valley language ideologies are complexly linked to linguistic features that indirectly index any number of multiple ethnic meanings at any given time (South Asian, African American, and Mexican American among them), whereas upper middle-class speakers avoid all such ethnically marked linguistic strategies. Shankar’s study reflects that important shift in the social history of the San Francisco Bay Area since World War II whereby non-white ethnic groups, especially Asians, have become much more socioeconomically stratified.

Mendoza-Denton (1997, 2007) examine the production of phonetic variables among Chicana teenagers in another San Francisco suburb. She found that the raising of the kit vowel before velar nasals was produced by those speakers with the greatest investment in the creation and maintenance of a Latina identity. Mendoza-Denton and Iwai (1993) and Mendoza-Denton (1995) analyzed Asian ethnicity in the San Francisco Bay area by comparing four Japanese Americans and four white Americans. Their results showed that the pronunciation of the vowel in face and the vowel in goat differed between Japanese Americans and whites, as well as between younger and older speakers of both groups. Their analysis for the Japanese Americans, in particular, argued that experience with the World War II internment camps marked a crucial turning point in Japanese American language ideologies, and highlighted the important intersection between ethnicity and immigrant generation with respect to linguistic practice.

Eckert (2008a) has also examined the use of linguistic resources in the construction of identity among Anglos and Chicanos in the San Francisco Bay Area, this time in San Jose (the focal city in the ‘South Bay’) and among younger adolescents, at two different schools. Her analysis of the trap vowel shows that speakers produce their vowels in relation to the particular crowds that define the social order at the two respective schools. Although one school’s crowd orients to the raising of the trap vowel before nasals, which is the Anglo norm, the other school’s crowd orients to the Chicano norm, where productions of the trap vowel are not conditioned by the following consonant. Crucially, both Anglo and Chicano kids from both schools can participate in both these ethnically correlated vowel patterns, because rather than directly indexing ethnicity, the variable production of trap indirectly indexes a field of available social meanings particular to each community. Eckert argues that kids of all ethnicities actively construct the meanings that are tied to ethnicity, so that the relation between variable production and ethnicity emerges through kids’ construction of their peer-based social order. Thus, for any multiethnic context, an informed analysis of patterns of phonetic variation benefits from viewing each moment of linguistic production as indirectly indexical of a field of social meanings that are linked to ethnicity through iterative practice (see Eckert 2008b).

The only known research within the city of San Francisco (as opposed to locations around the Bay Area, more generally) that explicitly considers ethnicity as a factor intersecting English variation and change is Hall-Lew (2009). This, along with Ong (1993), Williams (2006), and Starr (to appear), is also one of the few sociolinguistic studies of Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area, despite the group’s importance in shaping the local social history. Hall-Lew (2009) analyzed variable production of the vowels in lot, thought, goat, and goose across a sample of 30 residents of one of the city’s New Chinatowns (the Sunset District) – 16 Asian Americans (mostly of Chinese descent) and 14 European Americans. The study found statistically equal production of sound changes in progress across both groups, and no difference between them according to ethnicity. For both Asian and European Americans, the vowels of lot and thought were more likely to be merged among younger than older speakers, and the vowels in goat and goose were more likely to be fronted for younger and older speakers. This finding, which supports that observed by Hinton et al. (1987), contrasts with separate claims within sociolinguistics that regional sound changes, such as these, are more robust among white than among non-white speakers (Labov 2001). Based on an ethnographic analysis of language attitudes in the neighborhood, Hall-Lew (2009) further argued that, on a whole, older San Franciscans orient to a variety of English associated with East Coast urban centers and particular European American migration histories, whereas younger San Franciscans participate in western United States and specifically Californian social practices and ways of speaking which indirectly index ethnicity and specifically Asian American identities. In San Francisco, Chinese identities and practices have a particular historical prominence and present-day influence on the city’s ethnic landscape – Chinese practices are part of local practices. The linguistic markets in present-day San Francisco have thus emerged as a consequence of the city’s social history, in this case, the long-standing, indeed, foundational presence of Chinese ethnicity and culture, and the socioeconomic diversification of the Chinese American community, has made the acquisition of local authenticity possible. In this way, the social history of the city has important implications for understanding the present-day language attitudes, language ideologies, and patterns of variation and change in San Francisco English.

4. Conclusion

Current research on language and ethnicity in the San Francisco Bay Area sees linguistic variables as resources for the construction of ethnic identities. This perspective aims to go beyond simply correlating language use with speaker ethnicity, by asking how linguistic variables acquire meaning through social practice, and what those meanings reveal about the construction of ethnicity by the members of a community. This theoretical orientation allows researchers in linguistic variation and change to follow new lines of inquiry with respect to ethnicity by attending to the social meaning of linguistic variables and unpacking the processes by which indexical connections with ethnicity are created and reinforced. Analyzing the factors which unite and differentiate members of ethnic groups is absolutely necessary for studies of language and ethnicity, and is particularly crucial with respect to analyses of linguistic variation and change that compare frequencies of use between populations.

In San Francisco and, indeed, much of California (e.g., see Lo 1999), Asian American identities have a particular prominence on the ethnic landscape and offer various promising areas for linguistic investigation, even more so as the various Asian American communities each continue to diversify with respect to, for example, socioeconomic class, country of origin, or immigrant generation. As some of the studies reviewed in this article have shown, attention to the trajectory of social change allows for a deeper understanding of patterns of contemporary language use. This kind of historical analysis is especially fruitful in a context such as San Francisco, where the modern history began only in 1848, and archival records are readily available. Although this article has given an overview of only some of the relevant factors to the city of San Francisco, and even fewer to the Bay Area more generally, I hope it may serve as a call for increased scholarship on language and ethnicity in the region, and among individuals of Asian heritages and cultures across the United States and North America.

Footnotes

• *

   Correspondence address: Lauren Hall-Lew, Wolfson College, Linton Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX2 6UD, UK. E-mail: [e-mail]

• 1

   Ethnic labels used in this article refer to the source being cited, for example, the US Census, or terms used by various works discussed here.

• 2

   This new era of Chinese immigration included many people who entered the United States via San Francisco under the guise of being family members, even when they were not, forming a unofficial class of immigrants who became known as Paper Sons/Daughters.

• 3

   Such as the 1945 War Brides Act (allowing spouses and adopted children of US military personnel to enter the United States) being extended to Chinese Americans in 1947 (Chow 1977).

• 4

   The distinction between Chinese San Franciscans whose heritage traces to these varying places, in fact, is rarely an issue of discussion.

• 5

   Hapa is a loan word from Hawai’ian, meaning part or fragment, which was itself borrowed from the English word, half.

• 6

   Vowel class labels based on Wells (1982) lexical sets. The key word represents all instances of the vowel that appears in that key word, for example, the goat vowel represents all instances of (ow), such as totally, go, know and hope.

Short Biography

Lauren Hall-Lew researches phonetic variation in English in relation to understudied populations, such as cattle ranchers in Northern Arizona, or members of the US House of Representatives. Her dissertation analyzed vowel pronunciation and the progression of sound change in Asian American and European American residents of San Francisco’s Sunset District. She holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of Arizona and a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow with the Faculty of English and the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at Oxford University.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Kirk Hazen for his invitation and encouragement toward composing this article. She also owes a debt of gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their extremely insightful and useful comments. The acknowledgment that she has provided in her 2009 dissertation applies to this article, as well, and all remaining errors are, of course, the responsibility of the author.