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There are thousands of ethnic Chinese students from different backgrounds in British universities today, a fact that has not been fully appreciated or studied from an applied linguistics perspective. For example, there are third- or fourth-generation British-born Chinese; there are students from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore who have received whole or part of their primary and secondary education in Britain; and there are Chinese students who completed their schooling in their home countries. To add to the diversity of the Chinese student population, several distinctive varieties of Chinese are spoken as well as different varieties of English and other languages. In terms of their choice of language and social networks, the Chinese students have several options, including, for example, staying with their own language variety group (e.g. Cantonese, Mandarin); staying with their own region-of-origin group (e.g. British-born, Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong); and creating new transnational and multilingual groupings. This article focuses on a group of Chinese university students who have chosen to create transnational and multilingual networks. Through analysis of narrative data and ethnographic observations, we explore issues such as their socio-cultural identification processes, the interactions between their linguistic and political ideologies; their multilingual practices and what they have learned from being part of this new social space.
