The Multilanguaging of a Vietnamese American in South Philadelphia

This paper investigates the ways in which multilingualism manifests in the daily life of Tony, a multilingual individual and a first-generation Vietnamese American living in South Philadelphia. It examines how Tony navigates different linguistic resources that are available to him and how he conceptualizes his own multilingualism. As millions of other multilinguals, he is situated in the set of different, evolving and interacting languages present in his life, primarily Vietnamese, English and Cantonese but also to a certain level Spanish and Khmer: these languages provide him with affordances as well as tensions. In turn, Tony makes decisions of how to make use of these linguistic resources in the interactions with other people and when and where to make use of which resources, influenced by factors in his linguistic environment and influencing other inhabitants of this linguistic environment. Using observations, interviews and photoethnography, I attempt to seek answers to the following research questions: (1) How does the participant conceptualize different languages in his linguistic repertoires (Gumperz, 1964)? How does he perceive the concepts of “to own”, “to know”, “to learn” and “to be good at” a language? and (2) How does the participant, drawing from resources in his linguistic repertoires and other resources to make language-related decisions, construct his own action space? How does this individual action space interact with its surrounding social landscape?