37.2177, Reviews: Chineses in the Diaspora: Feiyang Tian (2026)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2177. Wed Jun 24 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2177, Reviews: Chineses in the Diaspora: Feiyang Tian (2026)

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Date: 24-Jun-2026
From: Christian Ranon [ckranon at neiu.edu]
Subject: Applied Linguistics: Feiyang Tian (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-1451

Title: Chineses in the Diaspora
Subtitle: Multilingual Practices and Chinese Identity in Los Angeles
Series Title: Encounters
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Multilingual Matters
           http://www.multilingual-matters.com/
Book URL:
https://multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781800411685

Author(s): Feiyang Tian

Reviewer: Christian Ranon

SUMMARY
Feiyang Tian’s Chineses in the Diaspora examines the multilingual
practices of Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles (LA). They propose and
examine an “LA Mandarin” justified by historical language contact
between the Chineses practiced by this particular expatriate community
(p. 2); following the classification system of Chineses proposed by
Leung & Wu (2011, 2012). More specifically, the terminological choice
of “Chineses” respects the internal language boundaries where certain
constituent “Chineses” are mutually unintelligible but are still
grouped under an ethnonational label. This labeling system, seen in
Leung & Wu (2011, 2012), is central to the book’s framing. Its
research scope addresses three questions: (1) how LA Chinese
communities respond to Putonghua’s global dominance; (2) how
non-Putonghua varieties interact with Putonghua across social domains;
and (3) whether the contact is generating a recognizable LA Chinese
variety and identity (pp. 16-18).
The theoretical spine is Blommeart’s (2010) sociolinguistics of
globalization, particularly polycentricity and orders of indexicality.
García and Li Wei’s (2014) translanguaging framework and Johnstone’s
(2016) enregisterment serve as secondary lenses; Sinophone theory
(Shih, 2007) is announced in Chapter 1 as a further theoretical
commitment. Fieldwork ran from 2013 to 2015 during Tian’s visiting
scholarship at UCLA, which yielded 31 semistructured interviews with
first generation immigrants aged 28 to 55, alongside 158 photographs,
radio recordings, 119 newspaper articles, and WeChat and Quora data.
Chapter 2 (pp. 25-52) applies ethnographic signage analysis to North
Broadway in downtown Chinatown and Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel
Valley ethnoburb. Tian identifies traditional versus simplified
orthography as the primary axis of sign differentiation, noting that
even the PRC Consulate Visa office uses traditional script externally
(p. 31). Four coexisting romanization systems appear in the data;
established names like “Szechwan” persist alongside Hanyu Pinyin
because they carry historical associations that phonetic accuracy
alone does not supply. Synonymous vocabulary from different varieties
appears in adjacent commercial signage: 方便面 (fāngbiàn miàn, mainland);
公仔面 (gōngzǎi miàn, Hong Kong) and 即食面 (jíshí miàn, Taiwan); all
designate instant noodles in the same commercial block. Tian
characterizes the ecology as superdiverse and polycentric, organized
around mainland Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwan Mandarin as three
normative centers.
Chapter 3 turns to biography. Five life portraits (pp. 53-81) trace
how individual life trajectories shape linguistic repertories: (1)
Jane, a mainlander, unconsciously acquired Taiwan and Hong Kong accent
features through sustained workplace contact (p. 59); (2) Bob, a
Taiwanese teacher, defends traditional orthography as cultural
inheritance and actively disidentifies from mainland Chinese ethnic
identity; (3) Stephen, a Guangdong-born academic, maintains Cantonese
as the home language while using Mandarin for outside communication;
(4) Victor, an eight-year-old American-born Chinese, wants to learn
Cantonese rather than mainland Mandarin because his peer network
identifies with Hong Kong popular culture (p. 73); and (5) Rita, a
seven-year-old half-Taiwanese child, alternates between Chinese and
American self-identification depending on national context. Across all
five portraits, non-Putonghua varieties emerge as resources for
constructing Chinese-Los Angelesian identity rather than as deficits
relative to a mainland standard.
Chapter 4 (pp. 82-110) examines heritage language education at the
Irvine Chinese School (ICS), the largest Chinese school in Southern
California with over 1,065 students. A documented finding is that the
Taiwan Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) distributes
free textbooks to Chinese-language schools throughout the United
States, regardless of whether a given school formally aligns with
Taiwan or mainland Chinese traditions. A teacher reports that
budget-constrained schools apply to TECRO rather than purchase
mainland materials, because TECRO supplies textbooks at no cost (p.
94). Twenty-four of thirty school websites examined use traditional
characters. Teachers describe rhotacization as effectively optional in
LA; a survey of 89 mainland parents found that 43.6% perceived a
distinct LA variety of Mandarin and approximately 61.6% agreed that
mainlanders’ accents were being influenced by Taiwanese accents (p.
105).
Chapter 5 (pp. 111-148) analyzes three Chinese-language newspapers,
three radio stations, and two digital platforms. Lexical co-occurrence
in print is extensive: both the Taiwan Mandarin toponym 长提 (Chángtī)
and the mainland Putonghua 长滩 (Chāngtān) for Long Beach appear in a
single World Journal article (p. 120). The neologism 短讯 (duӑnxùn, p.
134) combines morphemes from the mainland 短信 (duӑnxìn) and Taiwan
Mandarin 简讯 (jiǎnxùn). WeChat and Quora data reveal a “chain of
contempt” (p. 143): established Hong Kong and Taiwanese immigrants
stigmatize recent mainland arrivals. Taiwan accent is described in
online discourse as “soft, soothing,” and prestige-carrying while
mainland speech is characterized as “brusque.”
Chapter 6 (pp. 148-169) synthesizes the empirical chapters through
three theoretical arguments. Tian defends “LA Mandarin” as a variety,
not on the basis of phonetic, lexical, and syntactic features, but
rather on the grounds of social and psychological reasons (pp.
150-152). This is demonstrated through (1) attitudes of group
solidarity; (2) extant Chinese language media that facilitates the
development and spread of the proposed variety; and (3) the degree of
dialect awareness (p. 151). The concluding discussion addresses
Pavlenko’s (2019) superdiversity critique and traces indexicalization
of Hong Kong Kong and Taiwan features from regional markers to markers
of Chinese Los Angeles-ness.
The book is addressed to sociolinguists working on diaspora language
and new-dialect emergence, heritage language educators, and diaspora
scholars broadly.
EVALUATION
The case for an LA Mandarin has a coherent empirical backing. The
signage data, the biographies, the school field notes, and the media
corpus collectively support the claim that non-Putonghua varieties
occupy durable positions in LA Chinese communication rather than
yielding to mainland Mandarin dominance.
Heritage language educators benefit the most from reading this book.
The TECRO textbook documentation, the rhotacization data, and media
lexical co-occurrence findings translate directly into curricular
design questions that Chinese-language schools across California have
not yet systematically posed. Sociolinguists working on diaspora
language would find a social basis for justifying a particular variety
of a language, as argued here, to be most productive and theoretically
generative. Structural linguistics, however, would not find
paradigmatic evidence for an “LA Mandarin” based solely on the feature
inventory on pp. 150-152, as that is not how Feiyang Tian justifies LA
Mandarin’s existence. Readers who place their concerns more on the
political economy of heritage education cannot extract the
material-conditions argument from this book without outside reference.
García and Li Wei’s (2014) translanguaging framework is used
throughout this work as a descriptor of code-mixing behavior but its
extension into pedagogy is absent. Absent a normative analysis, the
argument that translanguaging represents a positive community resource
leaves the extension into a programmatic pedagogy on the table.
The finding that teachers turn to TECRO because of its free textbook
distribution is where Phillipson’s (1992) linguistic imperialism
framework offers the sharpest analytical purchase (pp. 93-94). Its
nationwide distribution of free textbooks represents an
institutionally sustained intervention in diaspora heritage language
education, delivering its definition of legitimate Chinese through the
path of least resistance.
There is a mismatch between the proposed theoretical architecture and
the vocabulary the empirical chapters actually deploy. Sinophone
theory, through Shih (2007), is announced in Chapter 1 as a central
theoretical commitment (p. 2), yet receives its substantive treatment
in approximately two pages at Chapter 6 (p. 165). Readers approaching
this book as a Sinophone study of LA will find the label present and
the analytical payoff deferred. Shih’s (2007) framework concerns
itself with the hegemonic claims of Sinocentrism and the
counterhegemonic production of Sinophone cultures; the empirical
chapters address these themes obliquely through attitude data and
lexical co-occurence.
Feiyang Tian defers an analysis on immigrant hierarchy stratification
between Taiwanese and mainland Chinese immigrants in the LA community
to further research, but this constrains the book’s present
conclusions. Second- and third-generation speakers are absent from all
five portraits presented in Chapter 3 and the teacher interviews
conducted in Chapter 4; they  appear as reported subjects, rather than
participants whose experience of correction and code-mixing is
independently documented. Beyond the author’s own limitations, the
class dimensions of variety formation are the most pressing open
questions that this book’s data could have engaged. Explicitly,
Feiyang Tian reports a $43,000 USD median household income gap between
Taiwanese and mainland Chinese immigrant communities in LA (p. 7).
That figure does not reappear when the book analyzes why Taiwan
Mandarin carries prestige in schools, media, and workplace
interactions. Whether variety hierarchies in LA track class
stratification is an empirical question this book’s own attitude
surveys and portrait data were positioned to address.
Following this, Tian does document the “chain of contempt” that recent
mainland arrivals face from the established Taiwanese and Hong Kong
population in LA (p. 132): the analysis treats this as a
sociolinguistic process without a proper analysis of its material
substrate. The socioeconomic gap found in (p. 7) is not connected to
the hierarchy that the book describes. The prestige of Taiwan Mandarin
in LA, its association with wealth, elegance, and status (p. 141), is
read more as a reified descriptive index rather than a process of
objectification that yields such an index.
A sustained reading alongside Lowe (1996), who traces the racial
division of labor in LA’s Asian American communities with a historical
precision that Blommaert’s (2010) mobility framework cannot supply,
would have grounded the prestige of Taiwan Mandarin in the material
stratification of the community, not in the sociological autonomy of
attitude formation. Takaki’s (1989) historical account of how Asian
American communities have been positioned within US racial capitalism
also offers a comparable material foundation. The TECRO program, which
supplies free textbooks that normalize Taiwan Mandarin as a legitimate
standard to Irvine Chinese School (ICS) alone, is not merely a logical
arrangement. It is a mechanism through which a community’s economic
position is reproduced through the institutional definition of whose
Chinese counts.
This book is best read as a diagnostic study of multilingual contact
ecology rather than a definitive account of LA Mandarin as a
structurally novel variety. Tian succeeds in showing that
non-Putonghua varieties are not a residual but constitutive of Chinese
Los Angeles-ness, and the empirical chapters give later researchers a
rich set of entry points. For heritage language educators, the
practical recommendation is to treat the TECRO textbook finding as a
curricular policy question, not merely a procurement convenience:
schools should audit whose standard their materials presuppose and
whether that standard matches the repertoire their students actually
bring. For sociolinguists of diaspora and new-dialect formation, the
recommendation is to take the observed median household income gap
seriously as an explanatory variable in prestige formation rather than
leaving it as a demographic background. For Tian and subsequent
researchers, the recommendation would be to extend the analysis to
second- and third-generation speakers and to connect Sinophone
theory’s counterhegemonic claims to the institutional channels through
which one variety becomes legitimate. Feiyang Tian leaves LA Mandarin
less a settled variety and more an open question as to whose Chinese
gets elevated in the diaspora.
REFERENCES
Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge
University Press.
García, O. and Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism,
and Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Johnstone, B. (2016). Enregisterment: How linguistic items become
linked with ways of speaking. Language and Linguistics Compass 10
(11), 632-643.
Leung, G.Y. and Wu, M. (2011). Critically problematizing the term
“Chinese”: Implication for language teaching and Chinese diasporic
communities. Journal of Modern Languages 21 (1), 48-58.
Leung, G.Y. and Wu, M. (2012). Linguistic landscape and heritage
literacy education: A case study of linguistic rescaling in
Philadelphia Chinatown. Written Language & Literacy 15 (1), 114-140.
Lowe, L. (1996). Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics.
Duke University Press.
Pavlenko, A. (2019). Superdiversity and why it isn’t: Reflections on
terminological innovation and academic branding. In B. Schmenk, S.
Breidbach, and L. Küster (eds) Sloganization in Language Education
Discourse: Conceptual Thinking in the Age of Academic Marketization
(pp. 142-168). Multilingual Matters.
Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University
Press.
Shih, S. (2007). Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations
across the Pacific. University of California Press.
Takaki, R. (1989). Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of
Asian Americans. Little, Brown and Company.
Tian, Feiyang. (2026). Chineses in the Diaspora. Multilingual Matters.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Christian Kyle Ranon is a graduate student in linguistics at
Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), Chicago, where their research
focuses on Systemic Functional Linguistics, Critical Discourse
Analysis, and the political economy of language pedagogy. They are a
volunteer ESL tutor with Oakton College’s VITA program, and they
pursue Mandarin Chinese education at Oakton College’s course sequence.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) USE DISCLOSURE
The author used an AI writing assistant for grammar and style
suggestions during the presentation of this review. All substantive
claims, interpretations, and citation judgements are their own.



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