Ethnic Rootedness and Social Affiliations at the Interface with Linguistic Performativity: Evidence from Americans of Southwest Asian or North African Descent

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between linguistic behaviors of Americans of Southwest Asian or North African descent (SWANA Americans) and their ethnic rootedness, religion, and locality. SWANA Americans are an understudied community in the field of sociolinguistics but could be highly visible in society. SWANA Americans have historically and legally been classified as white in the US despite the social perception that they are not white. The linguistic analysis in the present paper will reflect the social discrepancies between the top-down perspective of assigning all SWANA Americans a statistical race category versus the bottom-up perspective of examining the social implications of this community’s nuanced internal composition differences. Labovian Sociolinguistic Interviews were conducted with 54 SWANA Americans in the Upper Midwest and Southern California, and an ethnic rootedness metric was designed to measure individual speakers’ ethnic rootedness. The results show that higher ethnic rootedness, being a Muslim (in the more careful speech style), and being from Dearborn, MI, are significant predictors of higher rates of “reracializing” indexically bleached ethnically affiliated lexicon (words such as Ali, Muslim, Iraq, Mohammad, etc.) in the speakers’ English speech.