In the most recent New Zealand census, 23.1%, almost a quarter of the population of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest and most diverse city indicated that they had Asian ethnicity. The nationwide figure was 11.8% Asian. This can be compared with the European group at 74% nationally and 59.3% in Auckland. In Auckland, the Indian population is increasing most of all, with a 48.4% increase between 2006 and 2013, compared with a 16.2% increase in the Chinese population in the same period. In Christchurch, where this study was carried out, the figures are 83.9% European, and just 7.9% Asian, with a concentration of those reporting Asian ethnicity in the western suburbs of Christchurch. Less than 2% of the population of Christchurch identifies as having Chinese ethnicity, compared with 0.8% Indian (Statistics New Zealand, n.d.). This means that Asians are a much smaller and so perhaps more visible minority in Christchurch, with its mainly Anglo-Celtic population, than in Auckland.
Zhu and Li (2016) point out that the overseas Chinese in general have not prioritized the maintenance of their ethnic languages, but that their motivations for learning, maintaining, and using languages are associated with the families’ and individuals’ “sense of belonging and imagination” (p. 657) rather than necessity and opportunity, so we might expect the usual language shift (Fishman, 1991) to take place over a couple of generations. Li (2016, p. 8) attributes this rapid shift to the majority language in the place of settlement to overseas Chinese focusing on trying to learn the local language(s) as well as dispersed settlement patterns and the migrants being involved in service trades and thus interacting with the local population. However, the increasing numbers of new migrants from Asia in particular (80% of Asians in Christchurch were born overseas), including those who come for education, may keep minority languages alive for longer than this in the Asian ethnolinguistic communities in accordance with Stage 6 of Fishman’s (1991) Gradual Disruption Scale, Intergenerational Community–Neighborhood–Community links on a daily basis.
May (2002) commented on the possibility that people may adopt cultural and social practices without diminishing their allegiance to “an ‘encompassing group’ with which they most closely identify” (p. 13). With circular migration patterns, ubiquitous access to digital channels of communication and unprecedented mobility of young people, acquiring their parents’ languages is less about the heritage of the children of migrants and more about developing belonging in multiple locations for these young people raised in what Turner (1969) termed liminal space “betwixt and between” two languages and cultures.