Manoeuvring in the linguistic borderland: Southeast Asian migrant women's language strategies in Taiwan

This chapter explores how migrant wives from the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia in Taiwan negotiate their communication with their in-laws and how their use of language is essential to the process of integration developed along the course of their lives. Instead of measuring their level of proficiency, this chapter applies the concept of the ‘linguistic borderland’ to their strategies for responding to the pressure from in-laws and the Taiwanese state to adopt the local languages. This chapter finds that speaking English provides key resources for Filipino wives to perform their private and public roles, that speaking Mandarin enables Vietnamese and Indonesian Chinese to exercise their citizenship, and speaking Chinese dialects facilitates an easier entry into the borderland.