Silence, empowerment, and speaking up: a transcultural analysis of Southeast Asian female marriage immigrants’ nonfiction writing in Taiwan

Abstract

This study aims to present a sociocultural analysis of the linguistic experience of South Asian women who immigrate to Taiwan to marry Taiwanese men. In Taiwan, foreign wives and their husbands and children have gradually become a new multicultural, multi-ethnic social group. We argue that because of the power gap between the narrators (who write in Chinese) and the narrative subjects (who are unable to ‘write back' in Chinese), language has powerfully impacted the patterns of prejudice and the construction of subjects’ identities. Marriage immigrants are often subjected to the negative stereotypes created and exaggerated by language standardisation within a dominant ideology.