The Construction of White, Black, and Korean American Identities through African American Vernacular English

2001/06/01 by Elaine W. Chun · 152 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Aesthetics #African american #American English #Anthropology #Art #Context (archaeology) #Dominance (genetics) #EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning #Ethnic group #Gender studies #History #Identity (music) #Ideology #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Law #Linguistics #Multilingual Education and Policy #Political science #Politics #Race (biology) #Sociology #Vernacular #White (mutation)

paper · doi:10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.52

published in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1), 52-64 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2001/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02

Abstract

Discussions of racialized language rarely consider the linguistic practices of Asian Americans. This article examines one Korean American male student's conversational use of lexical elements from an imagined version of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Although the speaker's linguistic practices maintain the dominance of whiteness in racial ideologies in the United States, his particular uses of AAVE index his relationship with both whiteness and blackness. He thereby projects a distinctively Korean American male identity in the context of existing discourses of race and gender in the United States.

Citations

• Language, Race, and White Public Space
• Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life
• A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation
• Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice

Cited by

• Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth1
• Prestige (sociolinguistics) [wikipedia]