Structure and Process in Speech Subcommunities of Hmong Students at a Northern California High School.
Abstract Hmong students, like other language minority students, have had to develop viable strategies for reducing barriers to communication in educational settings. To do this, they have relied on one another to open channels of communication across a variety of cultural and linguistic boundaries. This study focused on the form and function of speech subcommunities of Hmong students at a northern California high school. The structure of these subcommunities, physically and linguistically, was described and analyzed from a sociolinguistic perspective with emphasis on communicative channeling and cultural mechanisms regulating the distribution of information within the subcommunities. The study also indicates that these Hmong students and their teachers make extensive use of cultural/linguistic brokers to communicate across speech community boundaries.