Tilburg University Chineseness as a Moving Target Li Jinling

The changing nature of Chinese diasporas 27
Chinese migration to the Netherlands is multi-layered and highly diverse in terms of the
place of their origin, individual motivations and personal or family trajectories. The
demographic and linguistic changes in the constitution of Chinese diaspora have farreaching
consequences for people’s language and identity repertoires, which is the
theme of this study. Having looked at the background information of the study, we
shall continue with Chapter 3 on methodology in which I elaborate the instruments I
deployed, how I got access to the fieldwork site and what kind of data I collected. The
sociolinguistic-ethnographic approach employed when gathering, analyzing and interpreting
the data of this study is presented.