This edited volume is the flagship volume of Vera Regan's new book series ‘Language, migration, and identity’. Containing fourteen chapters, this edited collection draws together a diverse range of topics and contexts, ranging from ethnographic research with the descendants of Polish immigrants in Brazil to a historical textual analysis of Irish newspapers in the United States. While this first volume includes some minor errors such as quite a few typos and the use of different citation systems throughout, the overall benefit of the volume to language and migration research outweighs the flaws. The chapters have been categorized by common research themes for the purposes of the review. It should be noted, however, that the chapters are not categorized into subthemes in the book itself, matching the editors’ goal of letting each chapter stand on its own.
The introductory chapter, written by Jennifer Martyn & Chloé Diskin, provides a succinct introduction to the volume, highlighting key research areas across the chapters, such as the role of identity in an increasingly globalized world, the growing importance of transnational research, and the continued growth of poststructural approaches to investigating identity in SLA. Martyn & Diskin also highlight the fact that the idea of an ‘immigrant’ has changed from implying a single point-to-point trajectory to instead referencing a mobile trajectory (6). They also discuss the importance of a recent shift by researchers to focus on speakers’ linguistic repertoires rather than just the languages they speak (e.g. translingualism; c.f. García & Li Wei Reference García and Wei2014). Finally, this introduction ends with a brief introduction to each chapter.
Chapter 4, by Agni Skrzypek & David Singleton, also encompasses a literature review, focusing on the age factor in SLA identity research. While this review is useful in its coverage, its treatment of identity is somewhat disappointing, especially in a volume meant to be focusing on poststructural ideas of identity. Instead, this chapter takes a very static, singular view of identity, evidenced through remarks such as ‘in a twelve-year-old arrival, linguistico-cultural identity is generally well on the way to being fully formed’ (83) and ‘Since adults have a fully formed L1 identity…’ (91).
Ethnographic research and poststructural explorations of identity can be found in chapters 5, 7, 10, and 12. Chapter 5, by Jennifer Martyn, is a well-written exploration of language learning practices and connections with gender, despite trying to do a lot in a small space. Martyn explores foreign-language learning in Ireland and uncovers fascinating results revealing a gender gap, wherein girls consistently choose foreign language subjects more often than boys and outperform the boys in these subjects. Additionally, Martyn reports on a gendering of language subjects, such that Spanish and Italian are offered in far more Irish girls’ schools than boys’ schools, but this is reversed for Latin, speaking to the underlying gendered ideologies associated with foreign language learning.
In chapter 7, Milène Pagès investigates two case studies of adolescent foreign language learners of French in Ireland: Marmoud (a Libyan-Irish secondary school student) and Igor (a Chinese-Irish secondary school student). Covering theories in attitudes and investment (Norton Pierce Reference Norton Pierce1995), Pagès convincingly argues that identities as influenced by social relationships affect level of investment in foreign language learning. Chapter 12, by Clarissa de Sousa Oliveira, also investigates heritage languages through the lens of intergenerational language transmission. The author uses ethnographic participant observation and interviews with forty-eight descendants of Polish immigrants to nineteenth-century Brazil. She finds that the participants maintain their heritage language by establishing themselves as distinct from Brazilian immigrant groups with similar sociolinguistic or cultural identities, especially Ukrainians and Germans.
Finally, chapter 10, by Alex Ho-Cheong Leung & Patrick Chi-Wai Lee, is the last chapter to use ethnographic methods, which they also combine with interviews and quantitative analyses of questionnaires from sixty-five participants in Hong Kong. Their interviews show the underlying complexity of participants’ identification, not captured by questionnaires. Participants were fairly ambivalent about their own identities because they were not sure about the future vitality of a Hong Kong identity. This ambivalence disappeared, however, when it came to being considered completely aligned with Mainland Chinese, a position with which they strongly disagreed.
In chapter 11, Chloé Diskin examines sociolinguistic interviews with seven Polish and Chinese immigrants in Ireland, selected from a full data set of forty-eight participants. Diskin conducts a fascinating study exploring the participants’ ideologies about Irish English and Dublin English. She draws upon Bourdieu's (Reference Bourdieu1991) linguistic marketplace to convincingly argue that unexpectedly the standard variety of Irish English is actually the more common unmarked, mainstream variety, as opposed to the posh D4 variety, the latter of which is remarked upon by participants as nonstandard.
Chapters 8 and 9 then use specifically quantitative methods to explore social identities among immigrants. In chapter 8, Ewa Kobiałka focuses on a quantitative sociolinguistic variation analysis of thirty-seven interviews with Polish immigrants in Ireland who are working in jobs below their education and experience levels. Specifically, Kobiałka focuses on Polish immigrants’ acquisition of Dublin English phonology. She finds that immigrants who are ‘status inconsistent’ are less likely to acquire Dublin English phonology due to the role of social identity in local phonology acquisition. She then importantly draws implications in turn for how immigrants are viewed by native Dubliners. Additionally, Chapter 9, by Ruth Kircher, focuses on a quantitative analysis of questionnaires from 226 first- and second-generation immigrants to Montreal. Kircher's aim is to uncover whether the Quebec Charter of Values has affected immigrants’ social identities or attitudes towards language use. Kircher found that if participants had a stronger Montrealer or Canadian identity, they held more positive attitudes to English and more negative attitudes to French. Conversely, if they had a stronger Quebecer identity, they held more positive views towards French and more negative views towards English. These findings have important implications, as she also found that nonimmigrants most strongly identify as Quebecers, while first- and second-generation immigrants most strongly identify as Montrealers.
Also included in the volume are two chapters from social psychology perspectives: chapters 2 and 6. In chapter 2, Sarah Smyth focuses on Russian speakers in Ireland to investigate their shared challenges of negotiating status as immigrants in Ireland, challenging Ireland to welcome more types of voices in public and private spaces. While commendable in aims, this chapter unfortunately has very little literature cited throughout, is poorly written, and has a lack of clear supporting evidence. In comparison, chapter 6, by Rachel Hoare, is a fantastic chapter focusing on immigrant children's perceived realities of life in Ireland. Working with children from seven language backgrounds, Hoare uses participant reflection and re-evaluation through multiple creative activities to highlight the agency of each child. Particularly notable is the task asking each child to write something that is good about having another language on a piece of paper, all of which were put into balloons, and then read aloud when caught and popped. This chapter has a good critical discussion of popular terminology, and very rich data, which would benefit from more extensive space for analysis.
Additionally, chapters 3 and 13 take a historical focus. Chapter 3, by Barbara Bidzińska, argues through Polish migratory history that Polish monoculturality is a myth historically and currently. This chapter provides an interesting overview of self-identifying ethnic minority groups in Poland (including Jews, Germans, Belarusians, Russians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians) to examine language transfer in modern Polish today from these sociolinguistic minority communities. In chapter 13, Regina Uí Chollatáin conducts a historical text analysis of five Irish newspapers and periodicals. She finds that in Irish Gaelic discussions of maintenance and revitalization, the writers try to discursively connect the UK and US Irish diaspora communities with the home country.
Finally, another valuable contribution can be found in the final chapter by Chefena Hailemariam, Sarah Ogbay, & Goodith White. Using approaches and literature from business studies and linguistic anthropology, the authors use frame analysis and principles of bargaining to investigate language brokering and negotiation between kidnappers and hostage negotiators. By analyzing ransom demands in Arabic, Tigrinya, and English from human traffickers in Eritrea, Sudan, and Egypt, the authors convincingly argue for the importance of linguistic style matching for successful hostage negotiations. This final chapter concludes a valuable volume on language, migration, and identity by pushing the limits of classic identity research to show its benefits in solving crucial real-world problems.
