Immigrant stories connection with sociolinguistics
Immigrant Stories are the detailed stories of people who have moved from one country to another and talk about their personal experiences and how the change in the society had an impact on them. While all the stories share sadness, suffering, fear and frustration, they also provide the readers with insight into the bravery, ingenuity, caring and love of immigrants. As immigrant stories deals with the changes that takes place in an individual life due to society, it has great concern with sociolinguistics as well. As Sociolinguistics is that part of linguistics which is concerned with relation between language and society. In other words, it studies the changes that takes place in a language due to the involvement of society while immigrant stories as stated before are stories about the change that take place and the effects it has on an individual when one moves from one country to another. These effects also include the change in language and how an individual deals with the language barriers that stagnant them from adjusting to those new changes. Therefore immigrant stories have deep connection with sociolinguistics as it is in the light of sociolinguistics that we study the common issue of language that arise after immigration.
For instance, the Immigrant story of Lin Min Hoon who moved from South Korean to United States at the age of five with her parents talks about in great detail about the language barriers that her parents has deal with and how difficult initially it was for them to settle down as the culture, the people and the language, everything was different from the place they migrated from. However, she also shared in her story that although for her parents it was difficult but for her it was really easy to adjust to the new environment as she was of the age where she could easily adopt to new changes which included acquiring a new language and that too with fluency of a native like any other early bilingual person which made life in the US very easy for her. Yet, many things were still difficult for her non-English speaking parents and oftentimes, as the first English-speaker in the family, she had act as the spokesperson for her parents. There were also many other instances that showed how hard it was for her parents such as Open house at school often meant acting as the translator for her teachers and parents. Mail at home had to be reviewed and translated. Some things that Lin Min Hoon took for granted were often obstacles to her parents. How can you select the option for Korean in automated telephone menus if you cannot understand the English instructions for doing so? How can people ask questions in the setting they're unfamiliar with and are unable to interact with the people around them? Are some of the common question that makes the language barrier all the more clear.
She also in her story state how back then, her parents were in a way isolated as they had few outlets for news or resources in Korean. Unlike in present, where there are plenty of over-the-air TV channels, several radio stations, a good selection of newspapers, along with numerous websites catered to many languages. However, when she was growing up, many of this did not existed. In the mid 90s, the only TV program her parents had was a fuzzy thirty-minute news segment that occurred every weekday. But over the years the resources now has grown considerably.
The story of Lin Min Hoon is a great example of how language barriers affects a person's life and also shed light on immigrant stories connection with sociolinguistics as It shows that when a society changes, one of the most important issue an individual needs to deal with is the obstacles regarding language.
