Joon Chang, Mabel Gong, Yanqi Qing, Esther Li, Yoori Kwak
Abstract
The term “Asian American” was coined by the late Japanese historian Yuji Ichioka in the late 1960s, in the midst of the burgeoning affirmative action movement advocated by African-Americans and other minorities. His original intention in introducing this ethno-racial identity was to deny the disparaging term “oriental” that Westerners had imposed on Asian Americans (Zhou, 2013). Over time, the Asian American identity became more widely accepted by Americans and Asians, and ethnicity grew to be an increasingly important point of discussion in today’s society. Second-generation Asian Americans who grew up in this environment, under the fusion of heritage and mainstream American cultures may reflect a hybrid self-identity. This hybrid self-identity can also be observed and expressed through the form of language.
Acknowledgement
First and foremost, we would like to thank Dr. Daria Bahtina and Ms. Mercedes Douglas who provided us with valuable advice from the beginning of the topic selection process and helped us tremendously when we encountered difficulties in the construction of the projects. In addition, we would like to thank each and every group member for their hard work and dedication to this project, it was the efforts of each of us that brought the project to life.
Introduction and Background
Asian-Americans are part of a wave of immigrants who began arriving in the United States decades ago seeking more socioeconomic flexibility. They are now one of the fastest growing minority populations and have become a vital group to American society and culture. As such, it is worth noting that second-generation Asian-Americans, who grew up at the intersection of their heritage culture and mainstream American culture, have a unique self-identification. These Asian-Americans tend to integrate their heritage language characteristics into English, in a manner that reflects their definition of self and ethno-cultural orientation as an expression of their hybrid identity.
To better understand the unique linguistic characteristics of second-generation Asian-Americans, we conducted a case study focused on California native Asian-American Randall Park. Through transcript analysis and observation of prosodic features during his interviews and stand-up comedy shows, we attempt to answer the following questions: Does Park have unique prosodic features or linguistic shifts that identify him as uniquely Asian-American? Does Park code-switch for his social identity? What stylistic shifts are observable in his performances that support these phonetic and prosodic shifts?
Korean Americans are the fifth most popular Asian-American group in the U.S. with an estimated population of 1.6 million (Ryu et al., 2013). According to the 2020 national census, 17% of California’s population consisted of Asian-Americans, a stark increase from 2010’s 13% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020).
Randall Park is an American actor, comedian, and writer. Park was born on March 23, 1974, in Los Angeles to Korean immigrants and grew up in Castle Heights, CA (Empire, 2022). A graduate of Hamilton High School’s Humanities Magnet Program, Park began attending UCLA in 1993. He later co-founded “Lapu, the Coyote that Cares”, the largest and longest running Asian-American theater company on campus and received his M.A. in Asian-American Studies in 1999.
We selected Park as the research subject because his media is easily accessible, he is well-connected with his Asian-American identity, and he is a good representation of individuals thriving at the intersection of East and West cultures.
Method
Much of the research performed on Asian-American speech has focused on cultural and linguistic borrowing from other American ethnicities to create an Asian-American speech community. Angela Reyes has several studies displaying Asian-American culture and speech as borrowing from African American dialect (Reyes 2005). However, our study will look into a different aspect of borrowing and look into the influence first generation immigrants have on their second generation children’s speech. Although second generation Asian-Americans are born and raised in the United States, they still produce observable prosodic features that are not fully native American English. To find these features, we will perform a case study on Park.
To narrow the focus of this study, we chose to examine only one Asian-American male celebrity. Park is proficient in both English and Korean. It is worth noting that all of the acting roles that Park saw success with tapped into his Asian-American background for comedic effect. This makes him an optimal subject for our study, as he has navigated Asian-American English with an acute awareness of utilizing variants relevant to different entertainment contexts — both naturally in interview and live speech settings, and more exaggerated in acting roles.
Several studies have identified phonological characteristics common among Asian-American English speakers. A survey conducted by the UC Berkeley Phonetics and Phonology Lab in 2016 regarding the “unique English Vowel Spaces of Asian-American Californians,” found one such feature where “Korean and South Asian speakers of Californian English had a more fronted foot vowel than the White speakers” (Cheng). A study by Lauren Hall-Lew and Rebecca Starr, who studied Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area, found additional vowel production differences where boat was pronounced beh-oat and the cot/caught vowels were merged to produce the same sound (Hall-Lew). Using these studies as a reference, we will analyze speech samples from Park, develop phonetic transcripts, and confirm whether the conclusions of the study corroborate with Park’s speech.
We hypothesized that second-generation Asian-Americans integrate their heritage language characteristics into English, which reflects their definition of self and ethno-cultural orientation as an expression of their hybrid identity. To verify our hypothesis, we examined 96 minutes of Park’s interviews and stand-up clips, during which we observed his unique production of the /u/ (i.e. boot), /ɛ/ (i.e. bet), /ɑ/ (i.e. father), and /aʊ/ (i.e. how) vowels. We selected 29 words samples from these video clips in which he produced these vowels and analyzed the spectrograms of each vowel using PRAAT. Of the 29 samples, 14 samples were discarded due to low sound quality, short phoneme duration, and unreadable spectrograms.
The 15 words we analyzed on PRAAT were:
/u/: movie, restroom, shoots
/ɛ/: friends, parents, restroom
/ɑ/: audience, body, job, mom, palms, trauma
/aʊ/: around, down, how
To use as comparison for Park’s pronunciation of these vowels, we had a male native Korean speaker and a male Korean American pronounce these 15 words. The native Korean was a 24-year-old monolingual born in South Korea who began his English education in the third grade. Due to the characteristics of English education in Korea, his English pronunciation is heavily accented. The Korean American was a 22-year-old bilingual, fluent in both English and Korean, who lived his entire life in Southern California. The Korean American had no noticeable accent when speaking English.
Using PRAAT, the section of sound containing the vowel was then isolated for further analysis. These vowel sections for each of the three individuals – Park, Native Korean, and Korean American – were compared with each other when spectrogram readability was possible to observe differences or similarities. A control sample from existing data on an American male speaker’s vowels was used to compare with the three Korean individuals (Figure 2).
Within the spectrograms of the vowels for the individuals, the F1 and F2 formants were observed in particular. Formants are concentrated areas of acoustic energy around a particular frequency in speech waves. The first formant (F1) is inversely related to vowel height, indicating the height of the tongue during vowel production. The second formant (F2) is related to the degree of backness of a vowel, indicating the front or back position of the tongue during vowel production.
Results and Analysis
Two examples of the /u/ vowel as in the word “boot” were the words “movie” and “restroom”. In the spectrograms of these two words (Figures 3 and 4), all three Koreans had higher F1 and F2 values than the American speaker (Figure 2). Also, Park’s F1 and F2 values were higher than the Korean American speakers. This shows that all three Koreans had a higher and more front tongue position than the American speaker in the pronunciation of this vowel, with Park’s being higher than the other speakers. This higher and more front pronunciation of the “oo” vowel can be heard in Park’s pronunciation as he says the high, central /ʉ/ vowel compared to the high, back /u/.
Two examples for the /ɛ/ vowel such as in “bet” are the words “friends” and “restroom”. Looking at the spectrograms for this vowel (Figures 5 and 6), we can see that all three Koreans had slightly higher F1 and F2 values than the American speaker (Figure 2), with Park’s being the highest. Similar to the findings of the /u/ vowel, we can see that the three Koreans had higher and more front tongue positions during the /ɛ/ vowel production with Park’s being greater than the Native Korean and Korean American. In Park’s pronunciation of the /ɛ/ vowel, the higher and more front /e/ vowel used in Spanish can be heard compared to the /ɛ/ vowel used in English.
Examples of the /ɑ/ vowel such as in “father” were “body” and “audience”. In this vowel, Park had higher F1 and F2 values than all other speakers including the American male (Figures 2, 7 and 8). There were no significant differences between the American male’s and the Korean American’s F1 and F2 values. Park had a slightly higher F2 value than the American speaker, indicating a more front pronunciation than the other speakers.
A vowel that Park had a unique pronunciation of that is not available from the American male is the diphthong /aʊ/ such as in “town.” A diphthong is a sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable. An example of this sound from Park was in the word “how”. In this sound, Park and the Korean American had nearly identical F2 values (Figure 9). However, Park had a slightly higher F1 value than both the Korean and Korean American, showing he had a slightly higher tongue position in this production.
These productions of vowels had little variation among different shows and interviews of Park. Although his pronunciation of the /u/, /ɛ/, /ɑ/, and /aʊ/ vowels remained relatively the same, several linguistic characteristics not part of his normal speech appeared during style shifts when taking on different stances.
In his stand-up comedy show on Comedy Central, several linguistic features that accompany his style shifts can be observed. The first linguistic style shift occurred at the sentence “bunch a kids just pointing at me and laughing at me”. At this moment, by raising the volume and tone of his own voice, g-dropping, and using “a” instead of “of,” Park implied that the behavior of bullying which was enacted by non-Asian children was a bad thing by putting those linguistic styles that are not his normal speaking style. Next, his second style shift happened with the words “I am confident now”. At the moment, he spoke in a higher tone with an authoritative voice, shifting his style to show that he has overcome his past trauma of being bullied and is now embracing his Asian heritage in a positive way. And lastly, he showed his style shift with the sentence “and I feel so good”. At this point, he spoke in a breathy and calm voice, with a lower tone. These linguistic styles all represented the peace he found after releasing his bad memories of bullying. These prosodic features or linguistic style shifts support his Asian-American identity. This could be supported by the characteristics of the Asian-American Identity Development Model of Kim (1981). The first shift mentioned above shows he went through Ethnic Awareness and White identification as an Asian-American when he was in middle school. After going through those bullies, he realized he is marked as a distinct ethnicity which is non-American, and also as one who suffers racial prejudice from the White. The second style shift shows that he still acknowledges that he is different from unmarked Americans as he did as a child, however, now accepts his ethnic heritage rather than tries to escape from it. This also supports that he does code-switch for his ethnic identity as a Korean American.
Discussion and Conclusion
This case study and research provided an opportunity for us to closely examine some socio-linguistic factors and impacts of the growing Asian-American diaspora. Additionally, we gained a better understanding of how second-generation Asian-Americans integrate into society through a linguistic lens. We hope that some of the findings of this study may be helpful in supporting English learners from similar backgrounds as our subject, potentially used as supplemental material in curriculum design. In the field of socio-linguistics, the existing studies focused on Asian-Americans are not as extensive as other ethno-racial groups. Thus, this project may serve as a good starting point for future research and development and we hope to inspire more studies to be conducted in this area.
Potential subjects we considered for our case study will serve as excellent focuses for future development. Asian-American comedian and actress Ali Wong was one example, where a closer examination of second-generation Asian-American females and a comparative study with Park be conducted. Additionally, case studies on Asian-Americans in different social contexts outside of entertainment can be valuable, in which case politician Andrew Yang can serve as a good jumping-off point. Since our study narrowed in on a native California, a deeper analysis of how U.S. regional differences can contribute to second-generation Asian-American English would be insightful.
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