“YOUR MAMA” Routine among Preadolescent Korean Boys in America

Abstract

This study explores the use of the “your mama” routine by four preadolescent Korean boys in order to understand how this discursive practice contributes to their construction of social identities. The boys’ interactions in a Korean community in America had been videotaped for two years and transcribed to analyze what it means for them to code-switch between English and Korean during the play. The findings indicate that code-switching signals the processes of meaning construction and indexes multiple socio-cultural meanings, functions, stances, and identities. First, by breaking the primary code preference, Korean and switching to English, the Korean boys are appropriating and subverting a tough African American voice and they extend their Korean masculinity; however, they maintain a strong Korean identity through their preferred code choice, Korean, which is shared and powerful in the Korean community. Second, in the micro-level, the code-switching between English and Korean creates multilayered indexical social meanings: a) footing to create different stances, b) contextualization cues to construct different contexts by breaking a frame, and c) metapragmatics (discussion about language in use). To conclude, the social meanings of code-switching can be (re)constructed depending on the relationships between local contexts and multiple intentional meanings of different people.