Heritage language communities as sites of struggle and identity negotiation: a case of Korean-American university students

This study explores how three Korean-American university students engaged with the linguistic and cultural practices of two subgroups in their ethnic community - a Korean church context and an ethnic peer group - where different language and cultural ideologies coexisted. The participants' narratives showed complex experiences of heritage language (HL) use and identity construction in these two contexts, with the participants frequently experiencing tensions between their desire to use their HL and pressure to adopt traditional Korean cultural and linguistic norms. They thus solidified their individual and group identities through processes of negotiation and self-positioning within a multicultural environment.