Heritage speech communities: Language shift and language contact in the Vietnamese diaspora in the United Kingdom

This chapter proposes an alternative concept of speech community as applied to heritage language use in diasporic contexts. It presents examples from the Vietnamese diaspora in the United Kingdom which feature instances of widespread language shift and language contact with Cantonese, producing language practices that draw on English, Vietnamese, and Cantonese. Since these examples pose problems for definitions of speech community based on largely homogenous usage (Chomsky, 1965), shared usage norms (Labov, 1972), or social norms (Gumperz, 1968), the chapter instead suggests to analytically establish diasporic speech communities through the indexical fields associated with them (Eckert, 2008a) as well as communicative situations, or comm-sits (Wiese, 2021). In doing so, the analysis locates membership in shared indexicalities, which can be invoked through context-sensitive language practices that draw on multilingual repertoires, as an alternative to membership through shared speech norms across different contexts. The chapter argues that even when using parts of the repertoire not classified as Vietnamese, membership in diasporic speech communities can be located in the ability to recognise and reference indexical fields shared by individuals socialised into diasporic groups.